|
Csound
Csound is a domain-specific computer programming language for audio programming. It is named Csound because it is written in the language C, in contrast to some of its predecessors. It is free and open-source software, released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1 or later. History Csound was originally developed by Barry Vercoe at the MIT Media Lab in 1985, based on his earlier system called Music 11, which in its turn followed the MUSIC-N model initiated by Max Mathews at Bell Labs. Csound development continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s, led by John Fitch at the University of Bath. Many developers have contributed to Csound, most notably Istvan Varga, Gabriel Maldonado, Robin Whittle, Richard Karpen, Iain McCurdy, Michael Gogins, Matt Ingalls, Steven Yi, Richard Boulanger, Victor Lazzarini and Joachim Heintz. Developed over many years, , it has nearly 1,700 unit generators. One of its greatest strengths is that it is completely modular and extens ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Richard Boulanger
Richard Charles Boulanger (born November 10, 1956) is a composer, author, and electronic musician. He is a key figure in the development of the audio programming language Csound, and is associated with computer music pioneers Max Mathews and Barry Vercoe. Biography Education After graduating from Somerset High School in 1974, Boulanger attended New England Conservatory of Music as an undergraduate, where his thesis was a commission by Alan R. Pearlman for the Newton Symphony titled "Three Soundscapes for Two Arp 2600 Synthesizers and Orchestra". After pursuing a Master's in composition from Virginia Commonwealth University, where Allan Blank was amongst his professors, he obtained a PhD in computer music from the University of California, San Diego where he worked at the Center for Music Experiment and Related Research. Boulanger continued his computer music research at Bell Labs, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, the Massachusetts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Barry Vercoe
Barry Lloyd Vercoe (24 July 1937 – 15 June 2025) was an American computer scientist and composer. Born in New Zealand, he is best known as the inventor of Csound, a music synthesis language with wide usage among computer music composers. SAOL, the underlying language for the MPEG-4 Structured Audio standard, is also historically derived from Csound. Biography Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Vercoe received undergraduate degrees in music (1959) and mathematics (1962) from the University of Auckland before emigrating to the United States. While employed as an assistant professor at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (1965–1967) and as the Contemporary Music Project's Seattle/ Tacoma composer-in-residence (1967–1968), he earned his AMusD in composition from the University of Michigan (where he studied with Ross Lee Finney) in 1968. Prior to taking these positions, Vercoe supported his doctoral studies by working as a staff statistician at Michigan; it was in this capacit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
MUSIC-N
MUSIC-N refers to a family of computer music programs and programming languages descended from or influenced by MUSIC, a program written by Max Mathews in 1957 at Bell Labs. MUSIC was the first computer program for generating digital audio waveforms through direct synthesis. It was one of the first programs for making music (in actuality, sound) on a digital computer, and was certainly the first program to gain wide acceptance in the music research community as viable for that task. The world's first computer-controlled music was generated in Australia by programmer Geoff Hill on the CSIRAC computer which was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard. However, CSIRAC produced sound by sending raw pulses to the speaker, it did not produce standard |
John Fitch (computer Scientist)
John Peter Fitch (also known as John ffitch) is a computer scientist, mathematician and composer, who has worked on relativity, planetary astronomy, computer algebra and Lisp. Alongside Victor Lazzarini and Steven Yi, he is the project leader for audio programming language Csound, having a leading role in its development since the early 1990s; and he was a director of Codemist Ltd, which developed the Norcroft C compiler. Education and early life Born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England in December 1945, Fitch was educated at St John's College, Cambridge where he gained a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1971 supervised by David Barton. Career and research Fitch spent six years at Cambridge as a postdoctoral researcher - winning the Adams Prize for Mathematics in 1975 for a joint essay with David Barton on ''Applications of algebraic manipulative systems to physics''. Fitch was a visiting professor the University of Utah for a year, then lectured at the University of L ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Domain-specific Language
A domain-specific language (DSL) is a computer language specialized to a particular application domain. This is in contrast to a general-purpose language (GPL), which is broadly applicable across domains. There are a wide variety of DSLs, ranging from widely used languages for common domains, such as HTML for web pages, down to languages used by only one or a few pieces of software, such as MUSH soft code. DSLs can be further subdivided by the kind of language, and include domain-specific ''markup'' languages, domain-specific ''modeling'' languages (more generally, specification languages), and domain-specific ''programming'' languages. Special-purpose computer languages have always existed in the computer age, but the term "domain-specific language" has become more popular due to the rise of domain-specific modeling. Simpler DSLs, particularly ones used by a single application, are sometimes informally called mini-languages. The line between general-purpose languages and doma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Victor Lazzarini
Victor Lazzarini (born 1969) is a Brazilian-Irish composer and computer music researcher. Born in Londrina, Brazil, he studied music in the local conservatory and completed his B.Mus. (Composition) at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). He received a doctorate from the University of Nottingham in 1996. Since 1998, he has been working at Maynooth University, where he is currently a Professor of Music and Dean of Arts, Celtic Studies and Philosophy. Lazzarini is one of the leading developers of Csound along with John ffitch and Steven Yi, and the author of the Sound Object (SndObj) Library. Lazzarini has contributed a number of new sound synthesis techniques such as Modified FM Synthesis, Vector Phase Shaping, Feedback AM, and Adaptive Frequency Modulation. He is the co-editor, with Richard Boulanger, of the Audio Programming Book. Lazzarini has composed music for films, as well as electronic and instrumental works. He was the winner of the AIC/IMRO Mostly Modern Internati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Unit Generator
Unit generators (or ''ugens'') are the basic formal units in many MUSIC-N-style computer music programming languages. They are sometimes called opcodes (particularly in Csound), though this expression is not considered accurate in that these are not written directly as machine-level instructions. Unit generators form the building blocks for designing synthesis and signal processing algorithms in software. The unit generator theory of sound synthesis was first developed and implemented by Max Mathews and his colleagues at Bell Labs in the 1950s. Examples A simple unit generator called OSC could generate a sinusoidal waveform of a specific frequency (given as an input or argument to the function or class that represents the unit generator). ENV could be a unit generator that delineates a breakpoint function. Thus ENV could be used to drive the amplitude envelope of the oscillator OSC through the equation OSC*ENV. Unit generators often use predefined arrays of values for thei ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
MPEG-4 Structured Audio
MPEG-4 Structured Audio is an ISO/IEC standard for describing sound. It was published as subpart 5 of MPEG-4 Part 3 (ISO/IEC 14496-3:1999) in 1999. It allows the transmission of synthetic music and sound effects at very low bit rates (from 0.01 to 10 kbit/s), and the description of parametric sound post-production for mixing multiple streams and adding effects to audio scenes. It does not standardize a particular set of synthesis methods, but a method for describing synthesis methods. The sound descriptions generate audio when compiled (or interpreted) by a compliant decoder. MPEG-4 Structured Audio consists of the following major elements: * Structured Audio Orchestra Language (SAOL), an audio programming language. SAOL is historically related to Csound and other so-called Music-N languages. It was created by MIT Media Lab grad student Eric Scheirer while he was studying under Barry Vercoe during the 1990s. * Structured Audio Score Language (SASL) - is used to describe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Structured Audio Orchestra Language
Structured Audio Orchestra Language (SAOL) is an imperative, MUSIC-N programming language designed for describing virtual instruments, processing digital audio, and applying sound effects. It was published as subpart 5 of MPEG-4 Part 3 (ISO/IEC 14496-3:1999) in 1999. As part of the MPEG-4 international standard, SAOL is one of the key components of the MPEG-4 Structured Audio toolset, along with: * Structured Audio Score Language (SASL) * Structured Audio Sample Bank Format (SASBF) * The MPEG-4 SA scheduler * MIDI support See also * Csound Csound is a domain-specific computer programming language for audio programming. It is named Csound because it is written in the language C, in contrast to some of its predecessors. It is free and open-source software, released under the GNU Les ... * MPEG-4 Structured Audio References The MPEG-4 Structured Audio Standard External links SAOL.net - MPEG4 structured audio (mp4-sa) Audio programming languages MPEG {{compu-lang- ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Max Mathews
Max Vernon Mathews (November 13, 1926 – April 21, 2011) was an American pioneer of computer music. Biography Max Vernon Mathews was born in Columbus, Nebraska, to two science schoolteachers. His father in particular taught physics, chemistry and biology in the Peru High School of Nebraska, where he was also the principal. His father allowed him to learn and play in the physics, biology and chemistry laboratories, where he enjoyed making lots of things from motors to mercury barometers. At the age of 9, when students are usually introduced to algebra, he started to study by himself the subject with few other students. That was because the vast majority of population there were farmers and their sons weren't interested about learning algebra, since it isn't useful for the everyday work. In the same way he studied calculus, but he never graduated from high school. After a period as a radar repairman in the navy, where he fell in love with electronics, Mathews decided to study el ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Wave File
Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced or ) is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 by IBM and Microsoft. It is the main format used on Microsoft Windows systems for uncompressed audio. The usual bitstream encoding is the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format. WAV is an application of the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) bitstream format method for storing data in ''chunks'', and thus is similar to the 8SVX and the Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) format used on Amiga and Macintosh computers, respectively. Description The WAV file is an instance of a Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) defined by IBM and Microsoft. The RIFF format acts as a ''wrapper'' for various audio coding formats. Though a WAV file can contain audio data compression, compressed audio, the most common WAV audio format is unco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Filename Extension
A filename extension, file name extension or file extension is a suffix to the name of a computer file (for example, .txt, .mp3, .exe) that indicates a characteristic of the file contents or its intended use. A filename extension is typically delimited from the rest of the filename with a full stop (period), but in some systems it is separated with spaces. Some file systems, such as the FAT file system used in DOS, implement filename extensions as a feature of the file system itself and may limit the length and format of the extension, while others, such as Unix file systems, the VFAT file system, and NTFS, treat filename extensions as part of the filename without special distinction. Operating system and file system support The Multics file system stores the file name as a single string, not split into base name and extension components, allowing the "." to be just another character allowed in file names. It allows for variable-length filenames, permitting more than o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
