Csound Revisited

From my silence here you might imagine I've been doing no programming at all. Nothing could be further from the truth. While it is true that my commercial and open source projects are pretty well at a standstill, I have been working with a variety of languages for music composition and processing, so you can soon expect some sort of follow-up to the articles I wrote on music control languages, Chuck, etc.

How soon? Well, maybe I shouldn't have said anything at all! I am deep in a Masters in Music Technology at the University of Limerick, the one run by the Roman Numeral Department (as only I call it). Properly it's the CCMCM, The Centre for Computational Musicology and Computer Music. Here I am being forced to confront the wonders of Java, Max/MSP and Csound.

It is the last of these that has taken me by surprise. I had previously pretty well dismissed this ancient language. Certainly it is a product of some bygone age of punch cards and batch processing. But it is not quite the relic I had assumed. Once I realised that I could a) whip up a quick interface in FLTK, b) call Python routines, c) call Csound from Python and d) create realtime music with interactive control (instead of mere algorithmic compositions) I became a lot more interested.

The first fruits of this dalliance will be premièred in Mainz, Germany this Saturday. Combining audio file manipulation, real-time MIDI control and a pretty OK interface, "The Absence Of Baudrillard" allows me to interact with pseudo-random events in the same improvisational manner I've been exploring for the last three years (using Reaktor). But the sounds are quite different.

Read about the thoughts behind this piece at The Theatre Of Noise.

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