With great power comes great learning curves – or maybe not. Csound for Live, just announced this weekend and shipping on Tuesday, brings one of the great sound design tools into the Ableton Live environment. You can use it without any actual knowledge of Csound, without a single line of code — or, for those with the skills, it could transform how you use Csound.

For anyone who thinks music creation software has to be disposable, you’ve never seen Csound. With a lineage going literally to the dawn of digital synthesis and Max Mathews, Csound has managed to stay compatible without being dated, host to a continuous stream of composition and sonic imagination that has kept it at the bleeding edge of what computers can do with audio.

Csound for Live does two things. First, it makes Csound run in real-time in ways that are more performative and, well, “live” than ever before, inside the Live environment. Second, its release marks a kind of “greatest hits” of Csound, pulling some of the platform’s best creators into building new and updated work that’s more usable.

If you’re not a Csound user, you just dial up their work and see what your music can do. If you are, of course, you can go deeper. And if you’re somewhere in between, you can dabble first before modifying, hacking, or making your own code. And that means for everybody, you get:

• Spectral processors
• Phase vocoders
• Granular processors
• Physical models
• Classic instruments

More description:

It looks great. It works great. It sounds… beyond great.

CsoundForLive is a collection of over 120 real time audio-plugins that brings the complexity and sound quality of Csound to the fingertips of ANY Ableton Live user – without ANY prior Csound knowledge.

Capitalizing on the design power of Max For Live, what once took pages of text in Csound can now be accomplished in a few clicks of your mouse.

Move a slider on your APC40 and deconstruct your audio through professional quality granular synthesis…

Touch a square of your Launchpad and warp pitch and time with real time FFT processing…

Press letters on your keyboard and create sonically intricate melodies through wave terrain synthesis…

And Dr. Richard Boulanger, unofficial Jedi Master of the Csound movement, instigator of this project, and Berklee School of Music sound and music wizard, posts a bit more:

With my former student, and now partner, Colman O’Reilly, I have been working around the clock for months to collect, adapt, create, wrap, and simplify a huge collection of Csound instruments and make them all work simultaneously and interchangeably in Ableton Live. In this guise, I am able to “hot-swap” the most complex Csound instruments in and out of an arrangement or composition – on the fly. This is something Csound could never do (and still can’t!), but CsoundForLive can, and it makes a huge difference in the playability and the usability of Csound.

Two weeks ago, I played a solo concert in Hanover Germany, at the first International Csound Conference. There, all of my compositions, from 20 years ago to 20 minutes ago, were performed in real-time using CsoundForLive. Tonight, at the Cycling ’74 Expo in Brooklyn, NY, I will be demonstrating the program; and next week, I will be releasing this huge collection (on Tuesday, October 17th, at 12:01am).

A huge part of the complete collection is FREE, and I hope it will make the creative difference in your (and your student’s) lives that it is making in mine. This is a serious game changer for Csound. Check it out. Dr. B.

If you’re at Expo ’74, do say hello to Dr. B for us (and I think you’ll get some nice surprises with this project).

I’ve got a copy in for testing, so stay tuned. And I’ll be doing some follow-ups with Dr. Boulanger and company.

The only bad news here, of course, is that both a supported version of Ableton Live and Max for Live are required to be able to run Csound in this way. In fact, sounds like we have a nice four-horse race going. Max 6 overhauls how multiple patches work (on top of Max for Live), SuperCollider has its own possibilities for multiple real-time patch loading, someone suggested in comments using pd~ inside Pd to manage multiple Pd creations (something fairly new even to most experienced Pd users), and now we have Csound in Live.

But overall, Csound for Live looks like a no-brainer for Max for Live owners, no question, and an exciting taste of the ongoing convergence of cutting-edge creative sound and code with live music making for everybody. As I hinted at in the Max 6 post, I think it’s suddenly a Renaissance for all these platforms.

http://www.csoundforlive.com/

Silly geeky footnote: With pd~ for Max, I know it’s possible to run Pd for Max. And via another external, Pd can also run Csound. So we could theoretically run Csound in Pd in Max in Live. But let’s not get carried away.

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Granular synthesis… you’ve heard it before. Famously articulated by experimental composer Xenakis, the process of slicing up sound into tiny bits and reassembling it has produced everything from lovely (or terrifying) synthesized sonorities to the underlying time stretching algorithms in popular music software. But with all the tools competing for your granular synthesis time (one seems to pop up every few seconds on the prolific Facebook page of sound designer Richard Devine), the Hadron Particle Synth promises to be different.

It’s a synth, but also an effect – and, for a twist, can seamlessly morph between the two, going from sound source to sound processor and shades in between. Its layering, parameter control, expression options, and all-around completeness lead its developers to confidently dub it “particle synthesis” and not just “granular synthesis.” And what may really convince you, it’s completely free, open source, runs and runs at release either inside Ableton Live as a Max for Live or within the free, geekily-delicious tool Csound. (Plug-ins for Mac and Windows are coming, too.) Whew. Now you’ve got my attention.

No video is out yet, but the Trondheim, Norway-based creators point CDM to their SoundCloud page for some sound samples.

Oeyvind Brandtsegg shares some delightful demo music for your sonic exploratory pleasure, complete with notes on its creation:

All of them made with Hadron as a primary ingredient.
The “Little Soldier Joe” songs are live recorded duo improvisations (Carl Haakon Waadeland on acoustic percussion and myself on Hadron).

Little Soldier Joe walks home with the sugar by Brandtsegg

Little Soldier Joe throws spoonful of sugar in the air just to hear the sound of it falling by Brandtsegg

Little Soldier Joe throws spoonful of sugar in the air just to hear the sound of it falling by Brandtsegg

Little Soldier Joe wonders where he put his keys by Brandtsegg

Little Soldier Joe walks down to The Future to borrow a cup of sugar by Brandtsegg

“Ramblin”, “Walking” and “SpinSync” were actually made as Hadron demo songs (the programmed drums are the only sounds not made by Hadron).

Ramblin by Brandtsegg

WalkingAndFalling(in progress) by Brandtsegg

“Magnetic Forest” was my first electroacoustic composition with Hadron (three improvised overlaid tracks, recorded as midi and edited/composed)

Oeyvind Brandtsegg has a delightful selection of tracks for your sonic exploratory pleasure, with notes:

MagneticForest (in progress) by Brandtsegg

“FeedingTheCharmQuark” (1 and 2) are improvisations with audio feedback into Hadron, where pitch tracking of the audio input is used to control grain rate, so there’s some organic/unpredictable stuff happening as a result of the feedback loop.

FeedingTheCharmQuark2 by Brandtsegg

FeedingTheCharmQuark1 by Brandtsegg

More on the tool:
Hadron Released [News Item]
Partikkel Audio
The team of creators (sound designers, DSP gurus, and Max for Live aficionados all)
and for the really good bits (including that Csound source): Partikkel Downloads

By the way, if you’re wondering how the business model works here when everything’s free and open source, so far it looks like Partikkel, cleverly, has a Hadron expansion pack of “Time Dilation Effects.” Clever — free and open source software, plus what in gaming is called DLC (“downloadable content”). It could be The Future. Either way, it’s The Awesome for now.

I may fire up Csound this week so I can play with the source version. I also need to dig up the Csound for Pd external so I can use those two tools together. And of course I’ll use it in Max for Live, too, just to make sure there’s no chance my head doesn’t explode.

There are plenty of reasons to consider free software tools as part of your toolchain for music making. They might fit your budget, give you needed flexibility, allow you to use a tool driven more by development needs than commercial ones, give you tools that would otherwise lack proprietary commercial niches, allow you to run (via Linux) on a wider variety of hardware or with greater low-latency performance, or allow you to contribute more directly to a project, from documentation to actual development. And increasingly, they don’t mandate some sort of philosophical choice, either – I routinely use free software tools on the proprietary Mac OS, and use commercial, proprietary projects (Renoise) on Linux or (Harrison Mixbus) to make free projects more powerful.

What usually holds people back from free software projects is, simply, not knowing where to begin. Software in general can overwhelm with choice; free software, often, doubly so.

Fortunately, some software gurus have jumped into the legwork so you don’t have to. I have some of my own thoughts on how to put this together, but first I wanted to share the input of these esteemed colleagues. These aren’t all Linux-only – many run on Windows and Mac, too – but if you are looking for a way to put together a robust studio on Linux, they’re a great start.

Webcast, Software Picks, Knowledge Databases

If you like real-time feedback, today, you can join Red Hat’s Adam Drew in a live webcast for “Open Your World,” entitled “Making Music with FOSS.” [Free and Open Source Software] It runs at 11:00a Pacific / 2:00p Eastern, and will be archived. (I’ll update that link here.)

Learn to make open source music–Register now for a webcast with Adam Drew

Warning: I just discovered that this thing pops up an annoying survey that assumes you use JBoss. (And, heck, CDM is indirectly a Red Hat customer – the whole site runs on RHEL.) Trying to tell it you don’t use JBoss makes the whole survey fail. I’m going to try to schedule something separately, as this is … more than a little ridiculous for a music-making survey, and sadly shows Red Hat’s blind spot in regards to end users.

Day job in tech, night job in music making – yup, that’s the M.O. of quite a few people around this community.

I asked Adam for his top picks, and he explained he would demo:

• JACK / qjackctl (the GUI for JACK), the tool for interconnecting audio, MIDI, and sync between applications
• Hydrogen Drum Machine
• Ardour, the terrific, all-free DAW
• Rakarrack, a free guitar effects tool set for Linux (one new to me, in fact!)
• ZynAddSubFX, probably the most capable free standalone soft synth – ugly, but very powerful, and a candidate for a “desert island” synth.

For additional resources, there’s a superb guide on the Fedora site (one that Ubuntu actually might mirror). It’s Fedora-focused, but the advice often applies to other distributions:
Fedora 14 Musician’s Guide

Adam himself operates the FOSS Audio KBase, full of articles on configuration and individual software programs. It’s about the most productive guide I’ve seen:
FOSS Audio KBase

Adam has some more philosophical thoughts:
Webcast preview: Free and open source software for music production [opensource.com]

And you can check out Adam’s music (CC-BY-NC-ND) and Linux-oriented personal blog. I tend to be more pragmatic about some of these issues, so I’m not endorsing all the opinions on Adam’s blog, but it’s a compelling read, and often comes with useful practical advice. (Mainly – I disagree with two points, one, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that proprietary DAWs lack interoperability, and two, I’m far more pragmatic about the future of Android as a platform, mainly because I think it’s currently the best bet for the distribution of free software on mobile. Oh, I don’t trust Google, either, though – that’d be silly.)

Picks from Dave Phillips of Linux Journal

Last weekend, I had the pleasure to meet Dave Phillips for the first time. Dave, an Ohio-based musician and teacher, is bar none the most invaluable writer when it comes to free software and music-making on Linux. His series for Linux Journal in particular is a must-read.

Dave and I joined Columbia’s Brad Garton at Virginia Tech to do a bit of teaching, a bit of playing, and to enjoy the hard work of the Linux Laptop Orchestra. I’ll cover more of that soon, but in the meantime, I took some notes as Dave walked through a current take on the software for Linux that most excited him.

His picks:

• Ardour, naturally
• Ardour 3, the next-generation update to Ardour that at last adds MIDI support (and beautifully executed). Dave noted that you can and should install Ardour 3 alongside the stable Ardour, so you can test both. There are even pre-built alpha binaries, so there’s really no excuse: you could be up and running in less than the time it took to read this. (See a much earlier story from Dave on testing 3.)
• Harrison Mixbus: It’s not free software, but it is now Linux-native and supports Linux plug-ins, and it’s built on Ardour (and, in turn, contributes back to Ardour). As Dave put it, Mixbus is a mind-boggling value “from a company that thinks of a budget console as costing $100,000.”
• IR: LV2 convolution reverb. The work of Tom Szilagyi, IR is a brilliant, no-nonsense plug-in for powerful convolution effects; LV2 support means it runs beautifully in hosts like Ardour 2.8.x and higher and Renoise. I’m really grateful to Dave for turning me on to this one. woo, tangent has a nice blog entry on the plug.
• LV2, generally. Dave credits the evolving state of LV2, and the work of its principle developer, David Robillard, for a lot of innovation in free software and Linux audio. I’m surprised LV2 hasn’t gained more attention, in fact – it might be the best bet yet to finally help plug-in developers escape the shadow of formats like VST. But that’s probably a topic for another article.
• RubberBand Audio Processor Powerful time stretching tool, now on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. Available as a library, too, if you’re a developer – or just use it to mangle your audio files as an end user. Someone has already ported it to Renoise.

The focus of Dave’s presentation, though, was one tool so deep, it could easily be your only tool, for the rest of time. AVSynthesis couples visual output in OpenGL with the veritable Csound sound and composition engine. It includes built-in sequencing capabilities, basic sound generators (themselves written in Csound), envelopes and modulation, the powerful MatrixSynthMod instrument, MIDI control, and effects (phasers, choruses, filter, waveguide filter, and so on). There’s shader support on the graphics side, too. The result: based on built-in building blocks or, if you’re adventurous, your own code, you can produce 3D audiovisual musical-eye candy performances. I hope we’ll take more look at this soon; the one question that came up repeatedly – and that Dave couldn’t answer yet – was what the workflow might be for adding your own Csound creations. (The package itself is built in Java.)

More information:
http://www.avsynthesis.net/
AVSynthesis: Blending Light and Sound with OpenGL and Csound5 [Dave in Linux Journal]

AVSynthesis Tour 1

Composing With Csound In AVSynthesis [Dave in Csound Journal]

Lest you think we’re all a bunch of “neckbeard” Marxist free software revolutionaries, though, Dave – who’s had drinks with Stallman on occasion – was also full of questions about Mac OS and curious about it for his own music making. I think largely we’re all technologically curious; if anything, the only people I’ve met who have gotten really emotional are the people who mistrust free software, perhaps because they just need to loosen up and accept that something really can be free.

But as with proprietary software, I think the biggest danger with Linux and free software is that you can become overwhelmed with choices rather than focusing on music. That’s part of why I find these choices so appealing: deep, capable, well-designed, and rock-solid, I’ve found them to be eminently musical. Some of the best demonstrate that free software can provide choice – not, as many believe, only compromise. And I see absolutely no reason that they can’t coexist with other popular proprietary options in your studio. You may not be ready to leap into Linux, but especially given that by now you’ve likely accumulated either extra machines or machines that can easily dual-boot, there’s no reason not to add these free tools to your arsenal.

Got favorites of your own? Let us know; I’ll continue to feature this stuff in coming days.

For all the wonderful tools and toys for sound out there, sometimes you want to find the couple of tools that, like a great kitchen knife, can accomplish the majority of what you actually need. (And as with the kitchen knife, while it may not eliminate your desire for all those other gadgets, it’s worth some sharpening.) So it is with something like Csound, the tested-and-tried, free synthesis tool. Jim Aikin looked at the QuteCsound front end recently, which puts the power of Csound in a more friendly work environment.

Via Synthtopia, there’s also now a screencast series that covers using QuteCsound, starting with digging into presets. (Yes, that’s right – presets. And here you thought you were going to have to do a lot of coding to have any fun.)

I find two YouTube users uploading how-to screencasts:
http://www.youtube.com/user/mantaraya36 (author of the series starting at top)
http://www.youtube.com/user/ketchupok (start with “Where to start?”

Also worth following is Jacob Joaquin’s excellent Csound Blog, hosted on Noisepages:
http://csoundblog.com/
and on Twitter, follow @TheCsoundBlog

It’s very early in development (“alpha”), but Jacob is already doing amazing things integrating Processing, the non-coder-friendly, artist sketchbook-style coding language, with Csound, in a new library called Csoundo. That’s an ideal combination, because you can do logic and visuals quickly in Processing, then turn to Csound for audio. This is where I imagine work in two of Csound’s most popular rivals – the object-oriented, OSC-savvy SuperCollider and visual patching, Max-descendent Pure Data – may lead, as well. Check out Jacob’s roadmap for more.

By the way, I hear some folks are having some trouble building QuteCsound on Ubuntu, so I’ll see what the issue is, and write up some instructions and send them over to Jacob for his blog.

It’s a good time for Csound and free synthesis in general. With this work accelerating, I think doing a series of absolute-beginner tutorials will be very doable soon. And there’s no reason you can’t integrate a tool like this with your favorite host of choice, from Ableton to Cubase.

In this guest column, we turn to veteran synthesist and music tech expert Jim Aikin. When Jim wants to do digital synthesis, one of the tools to which he turns is a veritable favorite with a direct-line legacy to the beginnings of computer sound. That doesn’t mean Csound hasn’t kept with the times, though, or that it has to be unfriendly. If you’ve been looking for a way to dive into sound and code, this could be an ideal path. -Ed.

Csound is one of the most powerful pieces of free, open-source, cross-platform music software in the world. But it’s not the most user-friendly. With the release of QuteCsound 0.6.0, developer Andres Cabrera has made Csound about as easy to use as it’s ever likely to be. You still have to type code — instruments and scores are created in ASCII. But QuteCsound streamlines the process with a built-in text editor that has auto-complete, syntax coloring, and a clickable index pane that lets you jump directly to any comments that you’ve entered in your score.

QuteCsound implements an excellent set of mousable graphic widgets for real-time control. (Okay, it’s not Max, but you can do a lot.) In another pane in the main QuteCsound window you can display the Csound manual. Using pop-up windows, you can define looping score segments and start and stop them with mouse-clicks.

All of the features of Csound, including real-time MIDI and OSC I/O, are available in QuteCsound. After creating a few instruments and a score, you just click the Run button — no need to invoke Csound from a command line. The command line flags are tucked away safely in a dialog box. (Yes, it’s not the ’70s anymore.)

Csound itself is a separate download. Both Csound and QuteCsound are available in doubles (-d) and float (-f) versions, and your two installs must match.

If you’re comfortable with writing code, you may also want to look at blue. Like QuteCsound, blue is free and cross-platform (Mac/Win/Linux). Now at 2.1, blue is a deeper and more powerful but less transparent front end for Csound. To my way of thinking, QuteCsound is more like “vanilla Csound with real-time graphic widgets and a nice text editor.” Blue is a multi-track composition environment in which each of the Sound Objects positioned on a track is created using Csound code.

If you’ve never looked at Csound, it may be a bit intimidating at first. One of the best ways to really learn the system is by buying a copy of The Csound Book, a fat volume that will take you as deep into the math. Advanced math isn’t necessary to produce sound, fortunately.

Here’s my favorite example of how easy it can be. Would you like a ring modulator effect? You can do that in Csound with a single character — an asterisk (multiplication sign). This line:

asig3 = asig1 * asig2

…ring-modulates signal 1 by signal 2 and puts the output in signal 3. There’s a little more to it than that: You have to make very sure that the levels of the two inputs never exceed 1.0. I usually recommend that newcomers to Csound not use headphones, because a bug in your code can cause ear damage! But with a little effort, you can build complex modular synthesizers in Csound using many different types of synthesis. If you take the time to get into it, you’ll be amazed at what it can do.

Visit Jim at musicwords.net. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to give this a try myself. -Ed.

Bloop HTML5 Instrument inspired by Brian Eno’s Bloom from Bocoup on Vimeo.

HTML5 and Javascript Synthesizer from Corban Brook on Vimeo.

Pioneers like Max Mathews’ Bell Labs team taught the computer to hum, sing, and speak, before even the development of primitive graphical user interfaces. So it’s fitting that the standards that chart the Web’s future would again turn to the basics of electronic sound synthesis.

A group of intrepid hackers and Mozilla developers and community leaders are working to make an audio API a standard part of this generation of Web browsers. (Note: not some unspecified future browsers – they’re making it work right now.)

We’ve already seen some pretty amazing experiments with Flash and Java. This would go further, opening buffer-level access to new, faster, just-in-time compiled JavaScript engines. The upshot: you get to code your own synthesizers and real-time audio processing in a way that works right in any browser, on any platform. Standardize the API by which this works, and adding an FM synth to a page could be as easy as assembling a table or inserting a picture.

There’s no plug-in, and thanks to faster JavaScript engines, JavaScript can be the language. To the end user, you just get a Web page that automatically loads the audio goodness.

I’m in touch with the developers, and hope to have a full-blown Q&A session with them. On the agenda: what this is, what it means, how it works, how people can get involved, and how to get started with these early builds. I’m going to start out with some of my own thoughts, though, because I’ve found myself thinking about this a lot. I’ve been a slow convert to the gospel of the browser and JavaScript, but I’m beginning to “get” it, I think. (If I’m off-base or missing something, we’ll get to cover that, too.)

HTML5 3D FFT Visualization with CubicVR from Bocoup on Vimeo.

To understand why this is incredibly cool, though, I think it’s first necessary to understand how incredibly stupid, primitive, and backwards a Web browser is. (I just lost a bunch of Web developers. No offense – there’s a reason it’s that way – but follow with me.)

I’m serious. The Web concept was rooted in an age in which bandwidth and computing restrictions constrained online communication to text. But even as the Web was first catching on, computers themselves had rich multimedia capabilities far exceeding what the browser could do. Today, a lot of Web nuts talk about how the browser could replace desktop applications, or become an “operating system.” But the browser is another application running on your hardware, running on your operating system. The question you might well ask is, why is the browser so limited? Why can’t it do the things the rest of your computer can? The idea that having a tag that specified playing audio or video took until now is kind of silly if you think of it that way, right? (You might ask the inverse question of the “desktop” apps: you do know you’re connected to the Internet, right?)

The idea of the audio API would be to change that, and not only play back sound files, but open up real-time synthesis and processing in standard, accessible-everywhere ways. You can, as you see in the (working, real, not-mock-up) examples, do all kinds of powerful magic. You can visualize music as you play sound files, or perform on instruments right from the browser window.

It’s one thing to talk about some distant future. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait. The code is working right now. You can finish reading this post and then grab a nightly build of Firefox, write a few lines of JavaScript code, and build a synth in the browser.

“Because it’s there” is usually a good enough reason to start hacking. But to musicians, I think there are actual creative benefits, too.

Endless compatibility. The work the Mozilla crowd are doing is already free to download on Mac, Windows, and Linux, stripping platform barriers across desktops, laptops, and netbooks. We’ve heard a lot from certain Mac advocates in particular about how you can only have “first-class” applications if they’re built for a specific OS. That’s fine – depending on the application. But as an artist, at some point I also want some shared tools. If I want to collaborate with someone, they’re what’s first class to me. There’s nothing worse than saying “oh, uh, I guess you have a Mac and I have a PC, so we have to…” It’s creativity-killing. Having browser-based tools on par with the tools outside the browser means we can keep our idiosyncratic tools of choice, but also have a shared set of tools we can access without so much as running an installer, let alone worrying about an OS, processor, or version.

Connectivity and sharing. Being in the browser means instant access to a musical application from anywhere, and instant data for that application. Right now, part of the reason computer musicians have a stigma of staring at computer screens is because the user interfaces we design live on individual machines and are designed to be used only by one person at a time. The connectivity in the browser means it’s easier to build sharing and collaboration directly into a software idea.

Browsers could make your “desktop” apps cooler. One of the myths of browser-based applications I think is the idea that they’ll somehow replace other applications. On the contrary: they could make your existing applications smarter. Unrelated to this particular effort, our friend Andrew Turley built a proof-of-concept application that connects a Web browser as a controller to other apps over OSC. With a little refinement, a free local Web server combined with a browser-based controller app could connect all your traditional music apps to computers in the same room or across the world.

In-browser Synthesizer and Sequencer with Envelope and Filter control from Corban Brook on Vimeo.

The power to make noise – any noise – and a tinkerer’s sunrise. Noise often appeals to hackers (even non-technologist hackers) more than anything else, and that should give you hope. One interpretation of current technology trends runs with the idea that tinkering is in danger, or even on the decline. I think we should be wary of some of those trends; some are simply anti-intellectualism in disguise. I also think tinkering with sound has a bright future. So long as there is raw buffer access somewhere, it’s possible to build something that makes sounds on a level as high as “give me a middle C” or as low level as “I want to invent a new form of synthesis.”

This isn’t just for propellerhead types. With readable code, even those new to programming and sound have an opportunity to start toying with their own experiments. And unlike almost any other medium, sound is both immediate and always satisfying. That is, even if you make some sort of ugly splat, you may still have a good time. That quality makes it perfect for learning and experimentation, whether you’re young or old.

From Babel to common code languages. I’ll also go out on a limb and say there’s potential to get more tools speaking the same language. On the visual side, right now, you can directly copy code from Processing.js (where anyone can easily see it) to a Java-based desktop Processing (where you get higher performance, full-screen and multi-monitor display, hardware access, and the like), often without changing a line of code. The same could happen here. People are already porting Csound examples to this freshly-minted audio API.

Nihilogic’s HTML5 Audio-Data Visualizations from Bocoup on Vimeo.

Open standards, open 3D. By making a standard, too, we have a lingua franca both technologically and in how tools can run. If it were only audio, that’d already be useful. But this extends to other efforts, like the work on WebGL. And WebGL is a good indicator, too: by supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 in the browser, both the “native” or “desktop” app and the “browser” app can share code and capabilities. The same could begin to be true for audio.

Anyway, enough of my third-party sense of what this could mean. Here’s where to go learn more:

David Humphrey is a man you can thank for making this happen. Check out his blog, and read in particular:
Experiments with audio, part IX

May 12 in Boston, there’s a “future of Web audio” event introducing these ideas, if you’re in the area. I’ll see if we can’t get events elsewhere. (This would be ideal for another CDM online global hackday – more so than our previous topic.)

The big post to read:

Alistair MacDonald covers the thinking, the potential applications, the history, and what’s happening now:
Web Audio – All Aboard!

And see:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API

Alistair sums up why this important:

A web browser that allows for such fine granular control over video graphics using tools like Canvas and WebGL, yet provides no equivelent control over audio data, is a web browser that is very lopsided. In human terms, web browsers have always been very lopsided. They reflect a specialized facet of ‘the human requirement’. This is unfortunate as the web can potentially encompass a far more balanced and expressive set of features, encapsulating our humanity. Fortunately the modern movement towards a more human browser, appears to have gained significant velocity… in the right direction.

Or, if the Muppet Animal were writing this, I think that would go more like:

NOISE…. MAKE NOISE. LOUD NOISE. MAKE LOUD NOISE.

More HTML5 Goodness

On CDMotion, spectacular 3D graphics, even for the lazy, plus Processing.js resources.

And perhaps more generally useful – especially for working with the 1,000,000 iPads Apple has just sold – Chris Randall has a brilliant and detailed post on hacking the SoundCloud player so it works even when Flash isn’t installed.
Something Wicked This Way Comes…
Or, I should say, by “brilliant,” it points out just how screwed up that particular situation is. So, SoundCloud developers, go read that and report back, okay? (I’ll be in Berlin in three weeks. We can all get some coffees and put together a generic solution that works everywhere. How about that?)

David Zicarelli has announced that Cycling ‘74 is discontinuing Max/MSP Pluggo-based products, meaning the company will no longer develop Pluggo, Mode, Hipno, or UpMix. More significantly, this means an end to the use of Max/MSP as a way of developing plug-ins; David writes that there will be “no further development on … their supporting technology.” It’s the supporting technology that Max patchers have relied upon to make their own instruments and effects for VST/AU/RTAS Mac and Windows hosts, and its demise to me is the real news here for the Max community.

The article touts the upcoming availability of Max for Live as an alternative. Now, I think Max for Live is a very exciting technology – I’m finally editing some videos and discussion with Jeremy Bernstein, so we’ll have a preview next week. The flipside is:

• Less compatibility. Ableton Live is just one host. Pluggo support RTAS, VST, and AU on Mac and Windows, so you could use your Max patches as plug-ins in tools like Logic or FL Studio, too. (Ultimately, having to figure out how to support all those things was part of Pluggo’s demise, but the desire to do so still holds.)
• No free runtime. Cycling ‘74 has been clear in that Max for Live will be a paid product. So, whereas a developer could create a Pluggo plug-in with Max/MSP and deploy it for free use anywhere, now you have to assume that the person using your plug-in will buy both Live and (separately) Max for Live.

For an example of why the Pluggo technology has been important, see examples like Ms. Pinky’s Wrecked System (though I appreciate the irony of that screenshot being Ableton).

Max for Live is awesome, it just isn’t Pluggo exactly – for better and for worse. The good news is, some of the oddball Pluggo instruments and effects will be available for Max for Live when it comes out, and existing owners will get that at a discount. But you might want to keep an old Mac or PC around running Max 4 and some of the strange plug-ins in the Pluggo collection.

Pluggo Technology Moves to Max for Live

Thanks to Jonathan Bailey and Nick Inhofe for sending this in.

The upshot to me is that Max/MSP is no longer such a viable development environment for effects and instruments, if you want any kind of wider consumption of what you’re making. It can be, at the same time, an utterly brilliant environment for yourself and for other people working with Max and Live. But on the other hand, part of the reason this may not be earth-shaking news is that there are alternatives – see below.

That’s not to argue with the fact that the Max + Ableton Live combination will rock and be a big deal – no argument there.

So, I actually think it may be a good thing for Max to have this focus, especially because, if you do want to support other hosts, there’s no reason to limit yourself to Max.

Open Source and Commercial Flavors

What I think is happening – perhaps naturally so – is a differentiation between the proprietary and open paths. If you choose the commercial Max/MSP – Max for Live – Ableton Live route, you get a really unparalleled level of UI polish and usability, and extraordinary integration between your Max creations and the host (Live).

The open-source altnerative now increasingly offers greater compatibility and flexibility. We’ve seen Max’s open source cousin Pure Data (Pd) run as the back end to a commercial game (Spore), on Linux on PDAs and old iPods, and as the back end to commercial iPhone apps.This is enabled by the fact that Pd is open source and community-supported, just as the ability to interoperate more deeply with Ableton Live was enabled by a commercial development process. (ChucK has also shown up powering successful mobile apps, like Smule’s Ocarina.)

That’s not to say one route is better than the other. On the contrary, it’s important to look at these two choices side by side because they’re different, and differently suited to particular situations.

And focus can be a good thing. In the case of Cycling ‘74, the decision was that plug-in support was no longer practical:

…we have had to face the fact that it is simply not cost-effective to support three different plug-in specifications on two different platforms, particularly given the increasing absence of standardization of host platforms we have observed over the past several years. Supporting our Max/MSP-based plug-in technology involves trying to make the entire Max environment run inside another host application. This was never a simple matter to begin with, and it has only grown more challenging with time.

It may indeed not make sense for Cycling to continue to provide this support. But it could be possible for others to support that – and, I hope, for us to someday have a better cross-platform plug-in standard, though that’s another discussion.

Alternative Plug-in Development Tools

There are other tools that are focused on plug-in development, and depending on your needs, they could fill the void left by Pluggo.

Here are just a few:

pdvst, free + open source, Windows

You know how Cycling is talking about how they have to run Max inside the host? That’s what this does for Pd. It looks like binarines are only available for Windows, but I see no reason this couldn’t be ported to other OSes, too. (I also remember some sort of solution for making LADSPA plug-ins with Pd, but maybe I just dreamed that.) I gave it a shot, and it’s actually quite nice.

Plogue Bidule, US$75, Mac + Windows

Plogue may actually come out on top as a cross-platform, commercial tool for building VST and AU plug-ins – only Reaktor here does that, and Plogue is quite a lot cheaper. ReWire works, too. That means Bidule will work with any host you like – even Reason – instead of just Live. If you only use Live, that may not matter, but if you use anything else … well, you get the point.

See our previous story: Plogue Bidule Modular Music App: Get Started, Meet the Creators

SuperColliderAU, free + open source, Mac

For people using the elegant sound coding language SuperCollider, you can now turn your creations into Audio Units, with full OSC control retained. Again, it’s quite easy to do.

SynthMaker, US$133-255, Windows

SynthMaker is tightly focused on instrument and effect creation, more narrowly-so than Max but as a result very powerful for the task. Also, if the Max for Live / Ableton combination doesn’t do it for you, SynthMaker is now included with FL Studio. It’s Windows-only, but you can develop plug-ins not only for FL but any Windows host.

SynthEdit, US$50 (shareware trial available), Windows

The gold standard of DIY plug-in creation, SynthEdit is actually sometimes notorious for its popularity (as in, “crappy SynthEdit plug-in). But don’t let that dissuade you: this is a powerful environment for making your own VSTs, and some truly brilliant instruments and effects have been created in it. There’s also some extensive documentation.

SonicBirth, free + open source, Mac

Why SonicBirth isn’t being widely used is really beyond me – maybe the death of Pluggo will wake people up to its potential. It’s a graphical patching environment for MIDI, audio, and instrument creation, it’s quite elegant to use, and it’s utterly free. The only bad news is, the open source version or promised commercial successor seem not to have gotten much development love lately.

Reaktor, $399 street (academic discount), Mac/Windows

Reaktor has the same limitation Max for Live does in that there’s no free runtime. But a Reaktor patch can run – and be edited live – inside any Mac or Windows host.

csLADSPA, free + open source, cross-platform

Still can’t figure out what this new-fangled Max thing is about when your CSound is working just fine? csLADSPA lets you write your own instrument and effects plug-ins in CSound and run them on any LADSPA host (it even works on Windows). Geeky, yes, but as I think about it, that’s pretty cool.

This is not an attempt to be a complete round-up, so anything I’ve left out, do let us know. I’m particularly interested to know how, say, SuperCollider or Pd users could target Mac, Windows, and Linux hosts.

Not Using Plug-ins

There is one … other alternative. Plug-ins have their uses, but everything Cycling is saying about the challenge of using them is absolutely true.

Ultimately, it’s worth thinking about why you’re using a plug-in. Do you just need to route audio or control from one place to another? Do you just want your strange, DIY step sequencer to sync with a track?

ReWire is one alternative, and Max continues to support ReWire.

But you can also use technology like JACK to route audio and (on Linux) sync and MIDI from place to place. In fact, while there are tools for creating your own LADSPA plug-ins on Linux, I don’t know anyone using them for this very reason – the support for jacking audio, sync, and control from place to place is so good, you can simply start your different music tools and you may not care that they’re not plug-ins.

Your Thoughts?

Okay, that story wound up being quite a bit longer than I had expected, but that’s the point – you have lots of alternatives. I’m curious to what you DIYers and patchers out there are imagining you’ll be spending your time doing over the coming months, whether it’s all Csound or all Max for Live.

Ah, the seasoned OS zealot. Never fear: no actual issues of substance will ever distract them from one-dimensional tirades about how their platform is best. And so, in the last week or so, you may have run across angry Free Software advocates railing against the inclusion of Windows on the OLPC ("One Laptop Per Child") XO laptop — or, in a really surreal turn, people waxing poetic about XP, like this commenter on the Win Supersite: "We get a world wide audience of children who will embrace XP and gain valuable lifetime skills."

All of this is a complete waste of time, not because the OS question is unimportant, but because it’s detracting from the more important question of education, which was supposed to be the point.

Part of why the OLPC mattered — and continues to matter — is it raises questions about what computers mean for learning. That’s a question we haven’t asked enough recently in the US, let alone across the planet. Whether Negroponte and the remaining OLPC project leaders have lost their way or not, that central question of computers and learning seems to be lost in the usual blog banter. Fortunately, it’s a discussion I think will survive after the immediate technologies have faded away.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a generation that got some exceptional educational training on computers, ironically because I think a certain suspicion of them made people more rigorous about educating with computers instead of just teaching them for their own sake. Show of hands, Reagan-era kids: how many of you learned to program with LOGO ("turtle graphics")? How many of you got to use music software? How many got to work with HyperCard? How many of you then later saw an education that later shifted to basic skills in tools like PowerPoint, instead of understanding real connections to other fields, mathematics, and programming techniques?

Platform does matter — especially given that, currently, the use of Windows breaks the Sugar interface, the educational software written for the OLPC, and critical hardware support for mesh networking, e-book reading, and power management. Maybe Negroponte will keep his word and port those to Windows; there remains reason to believe he won’t.

The question of learning, though, has been lost. I do believe that free software could be powerful for education, but it should be as a means to an end — not an end in itself. It’s one thing to say the software is free, it’s open source — another thing to figure out what it is you’re teaching. Free software opens the doors to the classroom, but it’s only a first step. And, honestly, those questions are important enough that we should be asking them about Windows and Mac software, too, software on proprietary platforms. Getting hung up on the free software question seems to derail that discussion — and allow people to conveniently duck all the real work of developing the tools.

The only really good analysis of the OLPC situation I’ve seen comes from Ivan Krstić, the head of security architecture for the OLPC before he (like so many recently) left the project:

Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi

Worth reading in full, but this for me is the bottom line:

But really, I digress. The point is that OLPC was supposed to be about learning, not free software. And the most upsetting part of the Windows announcement is not that it exposed the actual agendas of a number of project participants which had nothing to do with learning, but that Nicholas’ misdirection and sleight of hand were allowed to stand.

…

In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

Yeah, I’m not sure what that leaves either.

There are three key problems in one-to-one computer programs: choosing a suitable device, getting it to children, and using it to create sustainable learning and teaching experiences. They’re listed in order of exponentially increasing difficulty.

It’s disturbing stuff — but then again, I’m convinced that there are enough people who really do care about the deeper issues of learning that the issue will be alive — assuming the dunderheads in the blogosphere don’t let this disintegrate into a meaningless Linux vs. Windows debate.

Software and ideas could go well beyond just one piece of hardware — even carrying some of those hardware design principles to other devices, which arguably has begun to occur with the popularity of affordable laptops like the Asus Eee. That’s why I think some of the good news in all of this is former OLPC president of software and content Walter Bender founding the Sugar Labs Foundation. It suggests a future for the free and open-source learning software and unique "activity-based" interface on the XO, one that could work on other inexpensive laptops and your personal computer, too:

Sugar Labs

Sugar’s game-changing UI generated a lot of discussion — and often-warranted criticism. But one thing I noticed is that almost every review mentioned the music applications favorably. Music is one of the major draws of computing. And that’s not only for kids, but the adult reviewers, as well. If you think about how this can be built over time, music is a superb medium for talking about sound, physics, mathematics, aesthetics, time, and fundamental principles of communication, expression, and perception.

Music learning — and learning in general — also benefit from some of the other aspects of Sugar:

• Focusing on activities: I really love this interface. Everything you do is based on "activities" — files and applications allow you to pick up an actual project where you left off and continue work, logging what you’re doing in a persistent journal. It feels fantastic for creative work, not just for "kids." I expect we could see this interface pop up in other places.
• Teaching programming: Built-in apps teach Python coding, even to non-programmer children. It brings computing full circle to the days when PCs like the Apple II shipped with BASIC (incidentally, the product that launched Microsoft — otherwise Bill Gates would presumably still be an obscure college dropout). And the ability to code simple tools makes sure that computer users don’t hit walls with their ability to make the machine do what they want.
• Free, open-source, easy development: Forget about the philosophical aspirations of the free software movement for a moment. The ability to easily extend a computer with free software, and to see lots of source code for what you’re using as an example, has practical benefits. One real-world result: Sugar can live far beyond the OLPC if that project goes away.

Sugar does appear to have a future independent from the OLPC. It’s already included with a couple of major Linux distributions. It’s relatively easy to install on your PC. Activities run on cross-platform, open Python, which could eventually bring their benefits to Mac and Windows — no specific hardware required. (Java is getting added, as well.) The music software is perhaps the deepest and richest, based on Csound as a synthesis engine. I’m also interested in the partly-finished port of the Java-based coding language Processing — or ways in which Processing itself could benefit from

Again, the execution in Sugar may not be perfect. But the point isn’t whether it’s perfect. It’s not the OLPC, or Sugar, or Linux, or even free software as an ends in themselves. It’s figuring out what’s essential to building better educational tools for computers — and that’s a far more interesting question.

Ironically, amidst all this controversy, an OLPC developer XO machine just arrived at my doorstep. So I’ll be working to code for it, and will share what I make and what I learn about the device. I’m also in touch with other music developers working on the XO. Whatever happens to the project, I think there’s plenty to be learned. Stay tuned.

“Sure, the OLPC project is supposed to do wonderful things for children of the world, but what has it done for me, lately?” Well, if you fancy yourself one of the Earth’s children, the OLPC organization has assembled 8.5 gigabytes of sample content that’s free and Creative Commons-licensed — free to acquire, and free to use.

Jacob Joaquin, who runs the terrific thumbuki blog and the Csound Blog and is part ofthe team developing Csound for the OLPC’s XO laptop, shares the news via Dr. Richard Boulanger at Berklee. (See the press release as a zipped .doc.)

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.

They’re donated under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so you can “freely create, compose, mix, remix, share, distribute and redistribute these samples and use them for any purpose as long as you clearly attribute the source.” That means anyone, anywhere can make use of this library — no OLPC required.

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

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

Csound, OLPC Style

Whether you like the OLPC laptop itself or not, there’s plenty going on with the project. There’s the immediate impact of the hardware and software, yes — and plenty of opportunity to praise or criticize its utility there (perhaps the mark of a good, ambitious project). But there’s also the secondary impact. The OLPC has captured imaginations in terms of what future computers might be, and what they might mean to more of the population of the planet. More importantly, perhaps, it’s building a family of open source, Linux-based (and cross platform technology-based) tools, which could ultimately outlive the hardware platform. I have my own doubts about the OLPC itself, but the ideas for open sound making are about more than just that hardware. (For instance, just testing Processing, Arduino and Java on this kind of mobile platform can improve that software.)

The sample library is only part of the story; software tools is another part. Powered by Csound, the OLPC team wants to put sound synthesis and music production in the hands of kids — we’re talking serious digital synthesis here, not just GarageBand-style looping. That goal could ultimately go well beyond just the OLPC.

Csound is a free and open source development tool for sound design, synthesis, and signal processing, with a lineage that goes back to original developer Barry Vercoe and in turn descended from the first digital synthesis tools created by Max Mathews. It is the audio/music development system for the OLPC project, with integration with Python (though I’ve heard we should also see additional Java development).

Those geeky details aside, you’ll see in many of the reviews of the OLPC writers mentioning unusual and fun music toys. Those journalists are stumbling upon some of the projects below, and the process is just getting started.

Jacob had shared some brief looks at what he’s working on on his OLPC, but here’s the full overview from Dr. Boulanger, because there’s quite a lot happening:

Over these past two months the CsoundXO Developers – especially John ffitch, Victor Lazzarini, Andres Cabrera, Jacob Joaquin, Cesare Marilungo, and Greg Thompson have really pushed out some new and important tools and activities for the XO.  Links to some of these are below.

A most important result of this development initiative is the fact that John and Victor got the CsoundXO subset of Csound5 to be FULLY SYNCHRONIZED  and TOTALLY COMPATIBLE with the current release of Public Csound (and automated the process so that they will ALWAYS be in sync!) and Andres has a CsoundXO manual that is fully synchronized as well!!!!!

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Csound
+ Links to the Csound Activities, the new RPM!, the developer tools
(by Victor), and the toots.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Csndsugui
+ Victor Lazzarini’s AMAZING new GUI TOOLKIT for Csound Activity
Development on the XO
+ Victor has developed a wonderful small collection of tutorial
activities with sliders and buttons controlling CsoundXO
- waves – a simple additive synth
- synth – a subtractive synth with USB keyboard control
- playfiles – an 8 track remixer with record capability
- GMplayer – an iterface and instrument for loading and playing any GM file with Csound – using the Avid/M-Audio donated Sample Set

http://www.thumbuki.com/20080317/step-and-funny-talk-for-the-olpc.html
+ Jacob Joaquin’s new Activities developed with Victor’s Toolkit and
his blog and tutorials about the process.

* coming soon (within the next two weeks) by Greg Thompson

- CsoundEditor/Launcher – with virtual MIDI piano keyboard and CsoundXO manual integrations
+ including ALL the Boulanger Tutorials – TOOTS, Csound Book Chapter
1, Mastering Csound, Scanned Synthesis
+ including thousands of instruments and models from The Csound
Catalog plus dozens of compositions and MIDI instruments,

- CsoundRemixer – for jamming with the OLPCsound Sample Archive (and adding Csound FX instruments)

- GMPlayAlong – for playing general MIDI files with Csound and visualizing the tracks on the ascii keyboard, virtual piano keyboard and pianoroll

- PlayAlong Keyboard – for playing Csound Instruments from a USB and/or Virtual Keyboard: GMplayer, Sampler, SynthExplorer (all sorts of synths)

* coming soon (within the next two weeks) by Cesare Marilungo

- Image2Sound – for the sonification of pictures and drawings from the Journal and other OLPC Activities using his new image opcode collection.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:CSound – some thoughts on Csound for press and others

Here are the links to the XO Bundled Sound Activities (including especially the Csound Masterpiece by Jean Piché and Company
- TamTam Mini, TamTam Jam, TamTam Edit, and the SynthLab)

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Tamtam – all Csound – AMAZING – INTUITIVE – POWERFUL – and for Children!

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pippy (Some Csound)

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Memorize (Some Csound)

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure (Making the Csound connection now)

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Record  (capturing audio for Csound and Photos for Image2Csound conversion – thanks to Cesare Marilungo’s new
Opcodes!)

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Draw (paint program which with Image2Csound and Cesare’s opcodes – can now be transformed to audio.)

CPS is a powerful host for plug-ins. Like Native Instruments’ much-hyped platform KORE, it can be a plug-in in other hosts or host plug-ins itself. CPS is unusually powerful, with some truly unique features (aside from the normal VST/VSTi hosting on Mac and Windows). Director and Web browser supports makes this particularly worth a look if you’re building an interactive kiosk or a project involving live animation:

1. You can patch stuff: A powerful graphical patching feature set lets you create complex performance scenarios. And if that’s not enough:
2. You can code your own stuff: An SDK supports C++ and Java so you can create your own code


3. You can use it with Adobe (Macromedia) Director: CPS is the only app I’ve ever seen of this type that interfaces with interactive visuals and multimedia in Adobe’s Director, making this perfect if you’re one of the niche of people building museum kiosks or other Director-y applications.


4. It’ll run in your Web browser: Yep, you read that right; thanks to Director support you can publish to a Web-compatible version


5. Csound users will be at home, because it uses the structured audio standard estbalished in MPEG-4


6. It works with sensor input if you’re attaching I/O boards via serial so you can, for instance, make sounds by waving your hands over photocells. (See my ongoing coverage on this topic.)


7. It’s a great learning environment if you want to try out input from sensors, basic programming, patching, MPEG4 opcodes, and more.

CPS Introduction

CPS isn’t going to be entirely without updates, fortunately. It’s not quite as complete on Mac as Windows, but it does run on both, and the creator plans to update it with a new version of Sun’s Java Virtual Machine (so obviously, the whole thing runs on Java). It’s had a cult following in academia, not surprising given its feature set. Now if the creator would just open source the thing (if that’s possible) . . .

Thanks to CDM’s Atomic Afro for this one; Afro’s got his eyes permanently peeled for free music software. More discussion on the CDM forums.