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Something to try in your free time, could be interesting.

I was trying CSound several years ago ... by concept, latency doesn't exist.

http://www.csounds.com/

The idea is to build the music algorithmically, so you only need a CPU, not even a Sound card ... and "if" latency exist working with MIDI software devices, that doesn't exist when creating audio files directly from mathematical definitions.

I need to return to this some day ... I was checking and they have been working to advance this technology continuously :-)

you have to look fairly long and hard to find an OSS project that *isn't* just a reimplementation of an existing product.

Please let us know of what commercial products the following OSS projects are mere reimplementations:

• gcc
• emacs
• TeX
• Python
• Tcl
• emdros
• redet
• Transcriber
• csound

No comments and it's already slashdotted. Ah well. What are your thoughts on these products?

RoseGarden
Ardour
CSound

Do you really need anything else?

Matt Ingalls, a clarinetist/improviser/composer in the SF Bay Area, did some work with computerized accompaniment that was pretty impressive. His "Recent Works" release had some tracks where you'd swear there was a live pianist following the clairinet improvisations.

• Matt Ingall's software: mac frontend for csound, etc
• Matt Ingall's homepage: music, etc.

claire is a virtual improviser program i wrote in hmsl. i have no control over claire other than through my clarinet playing [claire listens through a pitch-to-midi converter.] although claire can play any midi device, in these two examples she is playing a disklavier.

I also know that Carl Stone was at least trying to do some work in this direction (at one performance he commented that in a recent attempt the latencies in the system made it sound like the computerized pianist was drunk... I don't know if he ever took it any further than that).

marco...
marco...
marco...

In all seriousness, does anybody have a link to the podcast referenced http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35/Profile.aspx? Cand=T&TRID=428 that's a .wav, or something useable? I'd be curious to hear it.

BTW, digital musicians might recognize Paris' name from CSound (http://www.csounds.com/).

-yb

Lemme see, 20,000 lines of code, 4 days, that's average 5,000 lines of code a day, say (roughly) 200 lines of code per hour, more than three a minute, all that with no sleep. Impressive!
I guess that less boastful people would admit using a data table generator here and there, but who cares when all the pundits just plug the numbers into some stupid coding performance metric anyway.

I bet that a reasonably good approximation of Deep Note can be created in Csound with about a screenful of lines in score and orchestra files and maybe some (small) tables.

It seems to me like innovative and experimental software is very commonplace in OSS. Unfortunately, a lot of it doesn't get noticed as it is never rolled into a "usable" product. Tempest, a radio broadcaster using CRT, is a good example.

Another obvious place where OSS seems to innovate is in low level networking programs. Ettercap is absolutely brilliant, for instance, and Ethereal is exceedingly useful as well. Perhaps these were created in part because they were necessary to write compatible higher level software to interoperate with other systems. Also, their internationally developed and non-profit nature might make their authors more likely to tread into "legally questionable" territory than a commercial venture would dare.

Despite the relative lack quality Linux-based music and audio software, there are definitely some innovative tools in this area as well, such as Csound, SuperCollider, and TaoSynth, which provide very interesting programmatic sound modeling possibilities. These programs wouldn't be generally useful to musicians, which is perhaps why they haven't been developed as closed-source commercial products, but for the somewhat rare musician-hackers out there, they're very interesting indeed.

There's plenty of innovation in open source. The only thing is, most of it is so niche that it's hard to hear of it.

> Admittedly, not too much open-source in that field.

You've got to be joking! I've been doing software synthesis for a least a decade with Csound, long before VST. VST plug-ins are a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the rich history of software synthesis. For more information about the field, I'd suggest The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads.

Look at Linux MIDI & Sound page and tell me there aren't "much" open source soft synths. Besides Csound, pd and jMax might be worth investigating.

...and if you want to write regular, non-live electronic music, try the language Csound.

Basically what you want to do is some time compression. You can do that by means of granulation or a FFT. Most audio applications already have time compression/expansion plugins built in to them. Sound Forge, Pro Tools Free, Live and Cool Edit are some of the commercial programs that come to mind. You could also build a stand alone program fairly easily with Csound, Max/MSP or Pure Data. These are audio programming/scripting languages. Csound and Pure Data are free. You just need to know a little about digital audio to make a program with any of those languages.

Look, I like TMBG and all, but they were most definitely not among the earliest electronic musicians, nor were they among the earliest computer musicians.

I'm waiting for the day when I hear someone say, 'That game sounds so great, I have to buy it!'

I'm a semi-pro musician, and I was discussing coding Csound instruments with a friend of mine the other day. We were lamenting the lack of a centralized online repository of free instruments, but the problem is the number of instruments to wade through quickly becomes unmanageable (easy to recognize, difficult to solve). Why is this?

Because audio clips can't really be shown as thumbnails. Where you can show one page of sized down images and have the surfer quickly navigate to whatever catches his eye, there is no parallel for audio clips. They essentially must be listened to independently and sequentially. And of course people won't take the time for this.

That's why people don't get as excited about game sound. Marketers can't use it to affect excitement. They can't demo it [intuitively] on web pages, print ads, or even on the game boxes themselves, so graphics are used solo for promotion.

Not to mention the various versions for Csound, including Chaosynth.

Not to mention the various versions for Csound, including Chaosynth.

But more to the point, what you'd really want for doing this is a programming language.Well, there are some sound programming languages, for example, CSOUND, which was originally created at MIT, is open source and is being constantly developed for more than 15 years by many people. It's quite complex, but there are GUI and other utilities to make it easier to deal with.

I own a Radio Baton. Dr. Schloss still refers to the instrument by it's original name, Radio Drum. Just to clarify, it was invented by Max Mathews, the person responsible for laying the foundations of computer/digital music.

In spite of their obviously different backgrounds -- Buzz comes from the MOD tracker community, whereas CSound comes from the 1960's academic synthesis community -- there has been a surprising amount of convergence between them, to the point that they now can compete for the same niche.

Seeing that these days the only I time I am rebooting into Windows is to run Cubase and various other music apps this is good news. I have been desperately trying to bring my music production over to Linux, in fact I'm picking up my copy of "The Csound Book" today. Over the years I have tried, with varying degrees of success, to run many of the freely available sequencers (Jazz), software synths, etc. Although I have never been a huge fan of ReBirth I have a friend who uses it and sends me ReBirth files once in a while. It will be interesting to see how they function in ReBorn.

Forget all the techno/electronica/house/doof-doof/etc. stuff they call "electronic music" nowadays. Look into electroacoustic music, the kind of electronic music that university music professors and electrical engineers have been doing since the mid 1950's (racks of punch cards fed into mainframes). Good starting links are SEAMUS and CSounds.

Simply because most the composers, including myself, use Protools . Protools was created for, and best done on Mac . Believe me, i use it on a PC- its SOooo much better on the mac. There is alot of other software, that is just for mac. DirectConnect, many software synths, newest versions of everything.

Its a sad state, but the Mac running OS 9 (protools doesn't support X at all) is just about the only way to go, unless you want to program CSound .

We already have several graphical softsynths available:

Pd: http://www-crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html

jMax http://www.ircam.fr/equipes/temps-reel/jmax/en/res ources.html

Also, there are also several well-respected text-oriented softsynths available:

Csound: http://www.csounds.com

sfront: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/sfman/user/ install/

does an appropriate language for defining a piece of music exist, a LaTeX for musicians?

Yes. There are lots of pieces of music software that are more or less comparable to LaTeX, in that they do specific tasks from the command-line and textual input: Csound for synthesis, SoX for audio manipulation, Lilypond for notation typesetting. They're all excellent pieces of software.

But I guess there aren't as many people who need to do only synthesis, audio manipulation, or notation typesetting as there are people wanting software that only typesets text. Music is always going to have more of a real-time, interactive nature.

That would be the "1541 Music Machine".

Taking advantage of the onboard 6502 processor and 2k of RAM, it made the venerable Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive play a crude, yet recognizable version of "Bicycle built for two", which was the first piece of music ever sung by a digital computer.

There are a lot of pieces that need putting together. I think Demudi is working on it.

One of... no... The most powerful, flexible, and extensible sound synthesis programs is Csound.