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The Csound Blog
Issue #9

When designing a virtual instrument in csound, the easiest approach is to create a single self-contained instr. Within this instr, any number of opcodes can be arranged in a near-infinite number of combinations. Each instance of the instr manages its own local memory space/variables/signals. Users customize the interface of the instr by utilizing p-fields.

With this fundamental model of instrument design, it is already apparent that Csound excels in terms of modularity. However, there are many other approaches that expand this concept even further.

Topics:

• Modular Design
• Interface
• Memory
• Synth Engine
• Control Instruments
• Zak
• Macros

More at The Csound Blog. For more information about Csound, please visit cSounds.com.

“There were a handful of records released in the late 70’s and early 80’s that contained computer programs as part of the audio. This is totally insane, and totally great.”

This is insane. As a musician and avid gamer, I’m surprised I haven’t heard anything about this before.

Read more @ Kempa.com.

Link via Kotaku.com.

This video is crazy awesome!

Video by Computadora Feliz. Link via c64music!

I want to share with you a promising new site called Csound for Newbies.

“The purpose of this site is to help the feckless, the despondent, the hopeless and the overwhelmed musician, programmer, and/or composer who wants to learn about the Csound audio and music software system.”

I have no clue as to who runs this site. Though it appears we share the common goal of helping those who wish to learn more about the language. Csound is cursed with an initially steep learning curve, and it’s great to see a blog dedicated to addressing this issue.

“The Acoustic, the Digital and the Body: A Survey on Musical Instruments”

“In the autumn of 2006 we conducted a phenomenological, qualitative survey on people’s relationship with their acoustic and digitial instruments. This is part of an ongoing research.”

The survey is still open if you wish to participate.

via HectorC on the Csound Mailing list.

flickr photo be me

Featuring guest appearances by Trent Reznor, Cat Power, and more, El-P’s follow up to his critically acclaimed Fantastic Damage will knock you out.

via worship the glitch.

At any given moment, I have at least four synthesis/audio books sitting on my desk for quick reference. Sometimes up to eleven. However, there are only a handful of websites I consider to be true tomes of synthesis knowledge. One of these is Sound On Sound’s Synth Secrets.

Here is a sample of topics you will find there:

Envelopes
Gates
Triggers
Filters
Sample and Hold
Vocoders
Formant Synthesis
Drums
Strings
Organs
and much more…

I figured I had to post something to celebrate Star War’s recent 30th anniversary. Posted to Youtube by champaR. Thanks to lagbnaft for the link.

flickr photo be MalteR

After matrixsynth.com picked up “My Sine Oscillator Experiment,” doktor future started a discussion about different ways of emulating analog oscillators in digital. Adam S mentioned that he thought the Plan B sine looked like a piecewise quadratic to him and provided the following function:

y=
-(4/pi^2)[x - (pi/2)]^2+1, x from 0 to pi
(4/pi^2)[x-(3pi/2)]^2-1, x from pi to 2pi

After having checked it out in grapher.app myself, and confirmed it did look similar to the Plan B sine, I implemented this as a wave table in Csound. See piecewise.csd.

Piecewise + Plan B Model 15

In this image, I have superimposed Adam’s recommended piecewise function over the Plan B’s Model 15 sine wave. As you can see, their contours are not quite identical, though very, very similar.

After listening to both waves side-by-side, the harmonic distortion in the piecewise sine example is a tad louder, and the frequencies are just slightly off. At least to my ears. However, I consider it to be a wonderful approximation of the Model 15.

Oh, the Irony

Peter Grenader, the principle designer at Plan B, has this written in his bio:

“In 2001 , Peter returned to analog after a 22 year hiatus because he tired of trying to force digital instruments to behave in like manner.”

I’m finding this whole discussion a bit humorous as the three of us are doing exactly this, trying to force digital instruments to sound like analog. In this case, Mr. Grenader’s analog oscillator.