How do you visualize the invisible? How do expose a process with multiple parameters in a way that’s straightforward and musically intuitive? Can messing about with granular sound feel like touching that sound – something untouchable?

Music’s ephemeral, unseeable quality, and the ways we approach sound in computer music in similarly abstract ways, are part of the pleasure of making noise. But working out how to then design around that can be equally satisfying. That’s why it’s wonderful to see work like the upcoming Borderlands for iPad and desktop. It solves a problem familiar to computer users – designing an interface for a granular playback instrument – but does so in a way that’s uncommonly clear. And with free code and research sharing, it could help inspire other projects, too.

Its creator also reminds, us, though, that the impetus for all of this can be the quest for beautiful sound.

Creator Chris Carlson is publishing source code and a presentation for the NIME [New Interfaces for Musical Expression] conference. But this isn’t just an academic problem or a fun design exercise: he also uses this tool in performance, so the design is informed by those needs. (I’m especially attuned to this particular problem, as I was recently mucking about with a Pd patch of mine that did similar things, working out how to perform with it and what the interface should look like. I know I’m not alone, either.)

The basic function of the app: load up a selection of audio clips, and the software distributes them graphically in the interface. Next:

A “grain cloud” may be added to the screen under the current mouse position with the press of a key. This cloud has an internal timing system that triggers individual grain voices in sequence. The user has control over the number of grain voices in a cloud, the overlap of these grains, the duration, the pitch, the window/envelope, and the extent of random motion in the XY plane. By selecting a cloud and moving it over a rectangle, the sound contained in the rectangle will be sampled at the relative position of each grain voice as it is triggered. By moving the cloud in along the dimension of the rectangle that is orthogonal to the time dimension, the amplitude of the resulting grain bursts changes.

You can see how Chris is imagining this conceptually in a sketch he shares on his site:

An extended demo shows in greater detail how this all works:

Chris is a second-year Master’s student at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics [CCRMA] in California. The iPad version is coming soon, but you can get started with the Linux and Mac versions right away, and even join a SoundCloud group to share what you’re making. You’ll find all the details, and links to source code, on the CCRMA site. (And if someone feels like building this on Windows, you can save Chris the trouble.)

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~carlsonc/256a/Borderlands/index.html

I also love this Max Mathews quote Chris shares as inspiration:

Max Mathews, in a lecture delivered at Stanford in the fall of 2010
“Any sound that the human ear can hear can be made by a sequence of digits. And that’s a true theorem. Most of the sounds that you make, shall we say randomly are either uninteresting, or horrible, or downright dangerous to your hearing. There’s an awful lot to be learned on how to make sounds that are beautiful.”

Beyond the technology, beyond this design I admire, anything that sends you on the path to making beautiful sound seems to be a worthy exercise. It’s a challenge you can face every day and never grow tired.

http://modulationindex.com/ [Chris' site, with more information]

Thanks to Ingmar Koch (Dr. Walker) for the tip!

Technology may be about the next Big New Thing, but as with music making in general, making music with tech is for many of us a lifetime vocation. So, it’s welcome news to find that time-tested tools, maturing over decades rather than months, are enjoying greater use than ever before. We saw Pure Data (Pd) attracting new interest as the embeddable libpd version allows use in a range of development environments and mobile platforms. Now, it’s about to be Csound’s turn.

Of course, before we get to that, if you’ve got an iPad 2 or “3″ (aka “the new iPad”), you can more or less skip this entire article and start making wild new granular sounds on your tablet. (Sadly, the original iPad is excluded here because it’s a resource-intensive application, though owners of that tablet – and other mobile devices – have plenty more to anticipate in Csound world.)

csGrain is a multi-effects processor that works its sonic-mangling magic live on sound, making use of something called “SyncGrain,” a real-time granular synthesizer. You can record from a mic or import tracks from the iTunes library (including, of course, your own music), or even use an included sample loop. csGrain then processes those sounds via a rich set of sonic tools, either live or to a recording, with sharing via AudioCopy, AudioPaste, email, and Dropbox. You also get setting randomization and a range of live effects, too. If you’re unsatisfied by the “finger against bathroom mirror glass” feeling of the tablet, you can connect an external MIDI input.

And, of course, it sounds amazing:

All of that is nice enough, but the bigger news is how this is all possible – and what is yet in store. Think Csound running everywhere, including learning about the tool and coding with it directly on an iPad.

csGrain uses Csound, the composition and sound design language that traces its roots back to the first-ever digital synthesis languages developed by pioneer Max Mathews. (It’s worth noting that Max’s ideas inspired the work of Miller Puckette on Pd and Max/MSP, too, meaning these are “all in the family,” as it were. Some even argue the model had an indirect influence on modular synths.)

csGrain is the first of a series of apps using Csound, including a massive, promising, everything-you’d-ever-want-with-Csound-on-an-Ipad app, covering documentation and code. This isn’t just an attempt to “cash in” on a geeky sound tool in the midst of the App Gold Rush — far from it. The application is as much a teaching opportunity as product. You’ll be able to use the application and its documentation to learn more about the sound processing technique, and discover the Csound code that makes the app tick. For some, it could be a first introduction to Csound, without having to be enrolled in an academic class. And for developers and sound artists who do want to make their own Csound creations, an upcoming SDK will unlock the power of Csound on other platforms (iOS being just one). That brings the power of “run anywhere” portability to text-based language Csound much as libpd has done for the graphical-patching tool Pd.

This image of a developer build of Csound Touch should be enough to set Csound fans’ hearts racing. (Okay, not a huge segment of the population at large, but I’m fairly certain most of them read this site.)

Developer Dr. Richard Boulanger, who has been a driving force behind almost every element of Csound’s recent development from the stuff under the hood to the documentation and the community, is now taking that sonic energy and applying it here. (And I do mean energy: sonic whiz “Dr. B,” as he’s affectionately called by his students, practically bubbles with enthusiasm and ideas. I’ll have what he’s having.)

He tells us that even in its first day, csGrain has made a big impact – no small task for an App Store inundated with volume and an application most would consider to be pretty niche in appeal.

The launch of csGrain has been pretty exciting. At the App Store, on day one, in the Paid Music Apps Catagory, we reached the rank of #8 (out of 4000+ paid music apps). We had over 957 people view the csGrain video at the Boulanger Labs site, and we were contacted by Richard Devine and Jordan Rudess with praise, congratulations and advice. We got some pretty great reviews at the App Store such as this one…. (I have no idea who this is by the way… which makes it even cooler….

“csGrain is a must-have effects powerhouse for the iPad. The sounds, usability, and musicality of the instrument are at least on par with the Moog apps, but the the potential for extension and customization far surpasses anything else. If you want to blow your mind in two seconds flat with this app, just press and hold any of the parameters (esp the sync grain ones) and a randomization window pops up, change the parameters and get instantly out of this world sounds. I really like the integration with Dropbox and AudioPaste functionality. And while you don’t need it at first, the manual is very well written for when you want to dig deeper. My only complaint is that the app is not yet in Retina-display, but I am sure that will be coming soon. Another nice feature improvement would be to augment the midi capability, which is already awesome, to allow for automatic learning of cc messages based on input like the way Ableton Live works. All in all, this is most powerful effects application on the iPad. Good job!”

I should also direct owners of the first-generation iPad to Richard’s explanation of why you can’t have the app:

It really doesn’t work on iPad1. It’s optimized for iPad2 and the new iPad. In particular, the stereo granular processing is both efficient and amazing, but… it’s also pretty heavy for the iPad1 and we would get some
breakUps in the audio on that platform – so we just made if for the 2 and the new.

But let’s get to what’s coming next. Dr. Boulanger gives us the full scoop. I imagine him sounding like Vince, the Slap Chop guy (and with good reason):

[Last week] was the release of csGrain (one of Boulanger Labs’ focused/targeted “spin-off” apps) and there are others coming over the next few months. But Csound Touch – which is coming in about 1 month – is ALL of Csound on the iPad…

The Csound for iOS API and SDK will be offered in the next day or two with all sorts of working models…
It will blow you away… how “easy” it is to develop audio apps with Csound as the DSP engine.

our .csd files are all offered with the apps.

One will be able to incorporate Csound into their own apps, games, whatever.

csGrain is just ONE huge .csd file – running under the hood… and there is a button there to see the code and it’s in the manual that is included too.

- we are sharing many tricks right there. But there are also tons of tricks shown in all the models that come with the SDK

Csound Touch IS Csound – all of Csound – for the iPad.

It is built upon and synchronized with the latest version of Csound5

It supports the realtime “rendering” of any Csound “.csd” file.

It can render .csd files from within the Csound Touch App or from the Internet.

It includes realTime “Console Output” (for diagnostics and progress monitoring) and supports “OFFline Rendering” for the realization of the most complex and demanding of “orchestras and compositions.” (For instance, if you wanted to create a sound with ten thousand oscillators and five hundred reverbs and two thousands filters it’s not a problem. This is Csound… all of Csound… and with Csound the only limitation is your imagination!)

Csound Touch supports Realtime MIDI control of any Csound-based MIDI instrument.

Csound Touch supports Realtime iPad/GUI Control of Csound Instruments via custom OnScreen Sliders, Knobs, XY controls and a Piano Keyboard.

One can Save to Disk or Render to the speaker or any pro audio interface in RealTime or once can do both Simultaneously! Jam and Capture! Remix and Record.

Csound Touch supports Interapplication File Transfer on the iPad Import/Export via DropBox, Email and AudioCopy.

To get you started with Csound; to inspire your creative spirit; and to support your study and exploration of Computer Music Composition, Software Synthesis, Signal Processing, Algorithmic Composition, Physical Modeling, and so much more…
the Csound Touch App includes:

Chapter 1 of Boulanger’s “foundational text” published by MIT Press – The Csound Book

The “classic” Boulanger Csound “Toots” from the Csound Manual

Boulanger’s “Mastering Csound” Tutorials

and there’s more!

We include the latest Csound FLOSS Manual (and all the Floss Instruments)
We include the Canonical Csound Reference Manual (and all the Manual Instruments)

and even more….

Selections from Boulanger’s Csound Instrument Catalog (30 years of Csound Instruments)
Selected Csound Compositions from the Boulanger Collection and The Csound Mailing List

Selected Algorithmic/Generative Compositions

A diverse and useful assortment of Dr.B’s favorite DSP Instruments
A varied collection of Dr.B’s favorite MIDI Instruments

A collection of OpenSource Audio Samples from the OLPC Sound Sample Archive.

Of course, this isn’t just about iOS: Csound is now in one form another either available or coming soon to Android, Ableton Live (via Max for Live), Max/MSP, standalone desktop applications, and the Mac AudioUnit plug-in format. I agree when Richard calls it “The Csound Renaissance of 2012.”

By the way, I think Richard has given those of us working on Pd, too, a real sense of what we could do with that tool (as well as an excuse to play with Csound anew). He tells us:

PS…. The Pd Rennaissance is also very very wonderful – the new book, the new code, the new possibilities…. all extremely exciting. After reading your blog on bit ago, I ordered the book and am very inspired by this initiative as well. So…. all cool and extremely important.

I couldn’t agree more.

So, once again, the timeline for the Revolution:

Coming soon (in a month)

Csound Touch – all of Csound on the iPad! Run any opcode, run any orchestra, run any composition. Run the entire Csound Book, Csound Catalog, Csound Manual. It all works and it’s all there!

and the a few weeks after that….

More Csound Apps such as:

csSpectral – Realtime vocoding, convolution, and spectral processing.

csFuzz – a rack of guitar effects.

csVoice – a vocal synthesizer, harmonizer, processor.

csGen – algorithmic, probabilistic, and generative composition systems.

csModel – a collection of Physical and Physically Inspired Models.

csClassics – a collection of synths based on the classic techniques – FM/AM/RM/WaveShaping/Granular/Additive/Etc.

The Revolution will not be televised, but it will be at:
http://boulangerlabs.com

You can find csGrain on our exclusive, multi-platform Apps section:
csGrain @ apps.createdigitalmusic.com

An, as always, don’t miss the central repository for all things Csound:
http://www.csounds.com/

We’ll have an interview with Dr. Boulanger later this week, so if you’ve got questions for him, ask away!

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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Max Mathews, the man who literally first gave voice to computer music, died yesterday at age 84. I can only offer my heartfelt condolences to Max’s friends and family.

Max was the man present at the moment when the very subject matter of this site was born. An IBM 704 playing his 17-second composition marked the first genuinely digital synthesis of music on a computer.

Max’s achievements, though, go beyond that initial breakthrough:

Digital synthesis of music.
The Music 1 software demo on an IBM 704 in New York City was the first computer music performance. While not real-time, and while Mathews himself says “the timbres and notes were not inspiring,” it was a stunning proof of concept.

The computer sings.
Mathews’ arrangement of “Daisy Bell,” for a computer-synthesized voice developed by a Bell Labs team led by John Kelly, was the first “singing” digital computer. The event found its way into pop culture via Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Computer music in code.
Computer tech is supposedly fleeting, but Mathews’ original work on the Music I – Music V series was the direct basis for languages like Csound and Cmix, used today. (Csound apparently even found its way onto a popular karaoke machine.) The basic notions of scores and instruments, the fundamental assumptions of the language, and the essential designed features all remain visible in today’s languages. Mathews indirectly influenced every other music language since. He is the namesake of Miller Puckette’s “Max,” a reference to the timing techniques used in what is now Max/MSP, which were modeled on techniques designed by Mathews. That means that there’s something of Max’s thinking in Max/MSP, Jitter, Pd, GEM, Max for Live, and others.

Innovation in gestural control.
Before the Wii remote and Microsoft Kinect would come to change popular ideas about gestural control of computers, Mathews’ Radio Baton explored similar spatial manipulation in musical performance. Add to that involvement with research and events like the “New interfaces for musical expression” conference, and Max has had a profound impact on the exploration of novel control.

Max was warm, witty, and insightful in every encounter I had with him, going on to continue to inspire colleagues and students through his late years. He played a role not only in our narrowly-appreciated realm of computer music, but the history of the computer itself.

There’s really too much to say; let us know if you have comments for CDM or contact us directly and I hope to put together something more detailed by next week.

The song “Daisy Bell” has a special place in computer history. Max Mathews, who had by the late 50s pioneered digital synthesis using IBM 704 mainframe, arranged the tune in 1961 for vocoder-derived vocal synthesis technology on technology developed by John Larry Kelly, Jr.. Kelly himself is better known for applying number theory to investing in the markets — an unfortunate achievement in the wake of a financial collapse brought down by misuse of mathematical theory.

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke happened to hear the 704 singing the Mathews/Kelly “Daisy Bell,” and the rest is (fictional) history – the HAL computer in the book and movie sings the song as he is being disconnected, as though the computer had learned this song as a “child.”

Here’s Max himself (namesake for Max, the patching language), overseeing a rendition of his arrangement:

Today, basic vocal synthesis has become part of the fabric of taken-for-granted tech, and the legendary rendition by a singing robotic voice part of our culture. These things are no longer futuristic or strange. Apple this week even launched a music player that announces its own tracks in the form of the new iPod shuffle.

But what happens when those same human beings imitate the computer? That’s the question asked by artists Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey, crowdsourcing human input by inviting thousands of participants to contribute their voice using custom recording software built in Processing. The basic technique is something Koblin has used before: his Sheep Market massed an Internet labor market, paid two cents on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to draw walls full of thousands of sheep. Those sheep proved at once massive in quantity and unique in individual quality, and, if you squinted at them, presented a critique of global labor practice.

Koblin has also done various seminal pieces with the Processing coding language that change our perception of data and technology, like his now oft-cited “Flight Patterns,” tracing the paths of overhead planes.

This time, the computer/human relationship is truly inverted. Each singer participant imitates a sound component from the robot singing. The humans are then combined to synthesize the robot sound instead of the other way around. The result: organic technology combined into a cyborg, online chorus. No one singer knows what it is they’re singing in whole. It’s perhaps the first mass-human synthesis of sound, and the results are truly unusual.

And strange synthesis seems to be what Koblin’s work is fundamentally about. Perhaps it’s not Mathews’ sound experiments, but Kelly’s ideas about quantifying global markets that are most relevant. (For an extra dose of irony, Google HAL – you’ll get stock ticker HAL, for Haliburton, one of the few stocks that has grown in this economy.) In our reality, the University of Illinois didn’t create a super-smart, spaceship-controlling robotic brain – but they did create the Web browser.

And after all, all of us are now living in the aftermath of many crowds of people behaving collectively without genuine larger knowledge of what they were doing. Robots were envisioned at the beginning of the 20th Century as out-of-control automatons, crushing civilization, and were often then appropriated as metaphors for fascist government. Now, the vision can be equally apocalyptic, but the meaning is inverted. It’s human beings acting as automatons – without contact with human scale – that threaten to crush the Earth. And this time, they’re capitalists.

On the other hand, the beauty of art is its ability to mean many things at once. Koblin’s sheep and now his singers never cease to be whimsical. And in their beauty, they suggest that perhaps even massed crowds of Internet-connected people can sing in harmony.

For the future of humanity, I hope so. But then, if we fail, we’ll always have the robots.

“Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?”

Bicycle Built for 2000: Info

Pop quiz: what instrument by pioneering “father of digital audio” (or, if you’d rather, “great-grandfather of Techno”) Max Mathews was featured on the cover of Playboy Magazine?

If you guessed the IBM 704 mainframe, the computer on which Mathews generated the first computer music the world ever heard, you’d be — wrong! Would that we were so lucky. I’m sure you hard-core geeks can imagine your favorite woman or man sprawled over those . . . crisp lines . . . cold, slab surfaces . . . humming away . . . see the 704 photos here and here.

The correct answer is, as shown, Mathews’ Electronic Violin, from the April 1998 Playboy. The player is a serious violinist named Linda Brava who, apparently, has an affinity for posing for soft-core violinist porn. Then again, if I were a blonde bombshell Finnish violinist, my publicity shots would probably involve me in lace-up boots, too. Brava has a hard-core violinist resume, but she really does play digital violins — not just for photo shoots.

But, in all seriousness, I don’t enjoy looking at Finnish violinist nearly as much as looking at IBM mainframes, especially as operated by serious-looking businesspeople in suits. So, for posterity, check out the real first digital musical instrument after the break (hit ‘read more’). Oh, sure, it was too slow for real-time digital audio and IBM discontinued it in 1960, but that hardly matters. 704 forever. Rock and roll!

My kind of porn below: never trust a computer you can lift.

The Princeton, NJ chapter of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is celebrating 50 years of the RCA Synthesizer on Thursday, April 14. (PDF info)

Automatic lounge music: The RCA Mark I
wasn't exactly what we'd think of as a synthesizer. Developed by RCA
engineers Harry Olsen and Hebert Belar, its original intention was to
pump out artificially-generated mood and lounge music for the honchos
at RCA Victor Records. (RCA must have been a little disappointed when
the device both failed to generate music on its own and was later
appropriated by academic serial composers — unless there's something I
don't know and Milton Babbit's gone platinum.)

How about a nice Hawaiian punch? The RCA wasn't real-time,
either. Instead, you programmed sounds via a punch-paper roll with
settings for filters, envelopes, modulators, and resonators, and heard
the results on 12 vacuum tube oscillators. The RCA did have built-in
"CD burning" of sorts: you could record sounds to a built-in laquer
disk cutter. Strangely enough, RCA Victor didn't see the commercial
application and instead of being used as a lounge music generator, the
Mark II model (upgraded to tape output) wound up in the joint
electronic music center of Columbia and Princeton Universities.

The rest is — you know. The RCA failed to revolutionize mood
music, but serial composers like Milton Babbit, Charles Wuorinen, and
others had a field day with the new synth, the first to really provide
composers with musical control. The RCA ultimately influenced the
real-time synths that would follow; if it didn't directly influence
Moog or Buchla, it certainly fired up the composers who hung around them. The RCA was also the spiritual predecessor to innovations like Max Mathews' computer-based system, which in turn led to the modern Csound.

Happy birthday: Well, a bit late, but well-deserved
nonetheless. (The Mark I was shown to the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers in New York on January 31.) The assembled folks in
Princeton will be host to Pulitzer- and MacArthur-winning composer and
Princeton Prof. Emeritus Milton Babbit, as well as some experts on the
RCA's history and operation, with music included. Anyone in Princeton out there? Check the PDF from the invite and let me know if you go!

And where'd that RCA go? Last I heard, the three-ton Mark II was lying in pieces around the Columbia Computer Music Center, unmaintained. Say it ain't so. I mean, it's great you have a gyro mouse in your lab, but this is a piece of history. (Anyone know for sure?)