I’m just realising how much I missed working with csound.
What’s csound? And why should you care?
Csound is a text-based language for rendering sound. “Eh?” What I mean is, it has various objects (called opcodes) representing things like oscillators, filters, noise generators, envelope generators, etc. It lets you string them together to make DIY synthesizers.
Why is that so cool? First of all, there’s the “lego” philosophy: it gives you the pieces without telling you what to do with them. Second, it puts all the power of your computer into music-making— if it’s fast enough you can play it in real-time like a hardware synth, if not you can write it to a file to play back later. Finally, it’s open source and free!
So why hasn’t it taken the music world be storm? After all, it’s been around for a hell-of-a-long time. Well, it’s only recently that it’s worked well in real-time, which is totally cooler than waiting for things to render. However, the real reason is that with freedom comes complexity. It sure is nice to sit down with a Korg or Alesis, twiddle a few knobs and instantly hear a rich, detailed sound. Nobody wants to sit down and program that from scratch, do they?
It is time- and energy-consuming, and that can be detrimental to the creative process. However, not everyone has wads of money to spend on pre-programmed synths. And some people get a kick out of doing things from scratch and doing things that engineers would never consider for a mass-market product. Csound is for those people.
I doubt that many people reading this are “those people.” So why am I plugging it here? Because I think that anyone who is the least bit interested in sound and noise (whether or not you think of yourself as a “musician”) should spend some time playing with it. You may not write finished pieces of music; but just like any time you pick up an instrument you’ve never played, you may enjoy messing around. If that sounds like fun to you, leave a comment and I’ll explore it further!
For now, I leave you with a short sample of a piece made in csound called “A great crossing.” The full recording can be found here.
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