Results for Csound

Some interesting things I found recently:

# Arduino ant farm

Ants walking through IR gates manipulate the Auduino synth program. John spotted this at the RobotFest / Mid-Atlantic Mini Maker Faire. He writes:

I went to the RobotFest / Mid-Atlantic Mini Maker Faire yesterday. I saw this awesome project and thought you might like to put it on the blog. Basically it's an ant farm with optointerrupts. When the ants walk through the lightpath, they modify the audio output. The maker's name is Adam Franchino, and he was there with some of his classmates from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) His website is adamfranchino.net.

# Jordantron

Jordantron is a new iPad synth app that will include sounds by Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater.

Omenie in the comments:

The core sound generation is the Ellatron engine, and the same 'Toblerone' rotating keyboards have been retained – for now …

Inside it there’s quite a few changes, particularly trading off CPU burden against responsiveness – it’s become clear, particularly on the iPad, that it’s worth burning more CPU to get ultra-low latency for responsive playing, in Jordan’s hands this thing is *fast* and pretty amazing.

We are still shaking out details but the plan is to have different iPad and iPhone versions, slightly more voices in the iPad version as it supports apps with a bigger memory footprint than iPhone.

And yes, all new sounds, and unlike Ellatron all the sounds are stereo (and really immersive and immense) and have been pulled out of Jordan’s live rig, so these are authentic DT voices. So it’s not very much like a Mellotron at all! I think this one will turn out to be a must-have app for the DT fans, but the sounds are so damn PHAT that general synth hounds may end up picking up one of these to add to their arsenal.

I’m really pleased with how it’s shaping up.

# Programmable Knex Piano-Playing Robot

plysaxaphone writes:

I've always been a big fan of K'nex, ever since I was a little kid. Then, when I discovered this website, I felt like I had hit the jackpot. This is a "robot" that I built out of knex, it's designed to play the piano. This version can play up to a 16 note sequence in a 12 note range. I call it "Zeeanobot" (Zach's Piano Robot), corny, I know, but I couldn't think of a better name. I spent a lot of time on this, and I'm very proud of it, so please be nice. Just to be clear, I have not tried it on a real piano, I built it to play my Yamaha DGX-230. You may need to modify the design slightly to get it to work on real pianos or other keyboards.

# Audiostry Synthesis

Audiostry V1.27 is made with Sync Modular. It's structure is based on Korg MS2000 but it is not an emulation. It has:

• it's own single cycle waveforms for the DWGS (48 waves),
• unison in polyphonic mode: each oscillator quadruples and is internally modulated by a slow LFO.
• dual filters.
• 2 more patch bays.
• 16 step modulation sequencer with 2 more lines (total of 5) and 39 parameter destinations.
• 143 finely edited presets.
• 16 voices by default but can be changed by user within Sync Modular. You need Sync Modular to run it.

Download it here: http://www.audiostry.com/synthesis.html

Sync Modular has been discontinued but it is now free. Get it here: http://www.syncmodular.com/

Grame, Centre National de Creation Musicale, has announced the release of Faust (Functional Audio Stream) 0.9.10, a functional programming language specifically designed for real-time signal processing and synthesis.

This version introduces several new possibilities. It is the first official release to offer full parallelization of the C++ code to exploit multicore architectures, as well as automatic generation of mathematical documentation.

New in Faust v0.9.10

• Several new options have been added to control how the C++ code is generated, in particular:
  • control of the floating point precision : single (default), double, quad
  • code re-organization in simple loops to facilitate automatic vectorization
  • automatic parallelization based on OpenMP
  • automatic parallelization based on a specific “Work-Stealing” algorithm
• Using formal methods the Faust compiler can automatically produce a complete mathematical documentation of a Faust program.
• Language Extensions
  • Sequential composition operator (A:B) has been restricted to expressions so that outputs(A) = inputs(B). This restriction has several advantages. It improves error detection, makes the code easier to understand and provides nicer and simpler formal semantic ( A:B is B o A)
  • User interface labels can now contain metadata. For example the label “volume[unit:dB][tooltip:control the output volume of the reverb]” contains two metadata, a unit definition and a tooltip message than can be exploited by an architecture file to fine tune the user interface.
  • User interface labels can contain absolute and relative pathnames to better control the hierarchical structure of the user interface. For example the label “../volume” points to place the widget one group higher in the hierarchy.
• Several new audio architectures have been included, in particular Action Script, CoreAudio, CSOUND, Chuck, Pure, SND-RT, for a total of about 20 different plateforms now supported: Action Script, Alsa, ChucK, CoreAudio, CSOUND, Jack, LADSPA, Matlab, MaxMSP, Octave, OSS, PortAudio, Pure, PureData, Q, Sndfile, Snd-RT, SuperCollider, SynthFile, VST, VSTi (mono)

More information: Faust / Faust @ Sourceforge

One Laptop Per Child wants to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.

Their mission:

… to stimulate local grassroots initiatives designed to enhance and sustain over time the effectiveness of laptops as learning tools for children living in lesser-developed countries.

The OLPC laptops run on XO, using components from Red Hat’s Fedora Core 6 version of the Linux operating system. It supports programming environments like Python and Csound, a programmable music and audio environment.

I’m pretty excited to see the children will get to play with tools like TamTam, a music and sound exploration application.

TamTam Edit (event sequencer) and synthLab (physics lab/sound synth modelled on Max/MSP)

Create Digital Music posts about the 8.5 GB of free, CC-licensed samples and music tools that come with the OLPC laptops.

Plenty of people contributed top-notch sound: the Berklee College of Music, Csound developers around the world, electronica celebrity BT (himself a former Berklee and Boulanger student, among other alums), M-Audio and Digidesign, and the Open Path Music Group.

Since the samples are donated under a Creative Commons Attribution license, you can use these samples as long as you attribute the source (without using the OLPC).

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Sound_samples

Check the OLPC Wiki for more details about the laptop and the CSound based tools included with OLPC.