Introduction

I’m a big fan of free, do-it-yourself software. For anyone who is willing to dig in and learn a few concepts, the creative possibilities are beyond vast. The same could be said of commercial software, of course, but the market pressures on commercial software companies not infrequently force them to limit the creative options that will be made available to users. With free, open-source software, any sort of visionary idea, no matter how far from the mainstream, can become a reality.

Make no mistake, though: There’s always a learning process to trudge through, sometimes a lengthy one. And because free software is developed and maintained primarily by cadres of unpaid volunteers, the functionality sometimes leapfrogs past the documentation.

Some very good free software presents the user with a point-and-click interface, much like commercial software. I use OpenOffice for word processing, GIMP for graphics, and Audacity for audio editing; all three are free and very capable. But sometimes, doing it yourself means actual computer programming—and programming is never simple.

Having debuted in 1985, Csound is quite likely the oldest music software still in active use. It’s a highly sophisticated system, capable of doing almost anything you might imagine in the way of audio—and also a great many things you’ve probably never imagined! All things considered, it’s not that difficult to learn. Once you’ve mastered a few basic concepts, using Csound is almost as transparent as plugging patch cords into the jacks on a modular synthesizer. But because of the huge variety of features that have been added over the years by dozens of talented programmers, Csound is one massive mother of a modular. Understanding how to get started and how to move forward is not guaranteed to be easy. Possibly a book would come in handy.

I certainly won’t claim to be a Csound virtuoso, but over the years I’ve dabbled with it quite a bit and have learned enough of the basics to be able to produce musical sounds. (I’ve also worked very extensively with, and written extensively about, commercial music software.) I was delighted to be offered the opportunity to write Csound Power!, first because I love the idea of helping people learn how to use free, do-it-yourself software, and second because writing the book gave me an excuse to really dig in and learn more about Csound.

All of the code in this book has been tested and works correctly with Csound 5.13. There’s no guesswork between these covers. Nevertheless, you need to realize that Csound is an ongoing project. As a topic for a book, it’s a moving target. Just before this book was sent off to the publisher, version 5.14 was released, and it includes at least one highly desirable new feature that is not covered in these pages. If you’re reading this book for the first time two or three years from now, Csound should still work exactly as described here—new versions are fully backward-compatible, unless an error sneaks in and hasn’t yet been corrected—but new features that may simplify or enhance some of the tasks described between these covers won’t be mentioned.

Note If you find technical errors in this book (there are bound to be one or two), please email the author at [email protected], so the errors can be noted online and corrected in a later edition of the book, should one be published.

Making music by sitting at a computer and typing lines of code would probably seem quite bizarre to earlier generations of musicians, could they glimpse it. It may also seem bizarre to musicians active today who still practice the time-honored art of making joyful noises by wiggling their fingers. But music is music, however it’s produced, and anything that produces musical sounds is a musical instrument, whatever its features. Csound is a musical instrument. But as Richard Boulanger likes to point out, in at least one respect it’s no different from any other instrument: If you want to make music with it, you’ll have to practice!

An instrument that lives inside a computer is not so complete a break with the past as you might imagine. Luigi Russolo’s groundbreaking manifesto, The Art of Noises, was published in 1913. Even before that, in the late 1890s, Thaddeus Cahill had been working on a way to generate music and distribute it to listeners using electricity. In the 1930s, concert pianist Percy Grainger championed the use of machinery to produce automated pitch contours. In the 1940s, Conlon Nancarrow began a decades-long exploration of machine-generated music, using player pianos to perform impossibly complex rhythms. By the 1950s, Pierre Schaeffer and other musicians were assembling sequences of tones by snipping apart and painstakingly reassembling segments of analog recording tape. Delia Derbyshire’s amazing (and largely unsung) work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s culminated in her realization of the theme music for the original Doctor Who series, which was produced in exactly the same way, by splicing tape.

I’ve always wondered what marvelous music we would have been treated to if Derbyshire or Nancarrow had been able to realize their musical visions with the aid of Csound.

If you understand what a provocative question that is, welcome home. Csound is quite likely what you’ve been searching for. It’s my sincere hope that this book will help you take your music in whatever directions you can imagine—and maybe in a few directions that you haven’t yet imagined. Have fun!