Now I understand. Realtime MIDI has my full attention.

Some people have not noticed yet, so I post here for a wider audience to see. Csound 5 is now present in Debian sid/unstable and in Ubuntu hardy and intrepid.
No need to compile from sources anymore! Hopefully csound will migrate to testing lenny once all dependencies have been built on all archs.

http://www.kneuro.net/abcsound/

This version supports keys, in theory at least, although it is not incredibly well-tested yet. It understands abc K: directives; also you can write any old gnarly key signature using this syntax in the abc file:

; The key of D major...
keysig G# C#

; The key of WTF?
keysig G# Ab Cb

Also c/ == c/2 now, as specified in the abc standard.

Cheers,

-- JK

For once, this will be a short article. Below, I've posted four simple bass instruments. I've been generating samples to use in Renoise (which, by the way, is available for Linux); I wanted a set of simple, but powerful bass sounds -- completely clean, and hugging the 16 bit maximum.

There is a new release of abcsound. Different URL this time: http://www.kneuro.net/abcsound/

I've added the ability to control pfield values within the abc score. There's also a somewhat whimsical tutorial page that explains how to use abcsound.py to generate .csd files, including multiple voices and pfield control.

Ciao, JK

A new release of abcsound is in the usual place: http://www.kneuro.net/ezscore. This version fixes repeats (again). It also implements default Q: and L: tags, and a simple default orchestra (a plucked instrument), so running

python abcsound.py someFile.abc > out.csd

I implemented abcsound by reference to Steve Mansfield's abc tutorial[1]. But upon reading the actual abc specification[2], I found that I had got a couple of things wrong. I have fixed two fairly major problems:

• The broken-rhythm notation "A>B", which should be interpreted as "A3/2B/2", is now working properly.
• Repeats should now be working properly, including alternate endings, which were hideously broken in the inital release.

As usual, abcsound can be found here: http://www.kneuro.net/ezscore/

Future work:

For anyone who would like to know:

Day gig: I work as a programmer and analyst in Baltimore, Maryland, US on large-scale IT projects.

Free-time substitute: I am working part-time on a Ph.D. by research at the University of Durham, England. Member of the ICAD community. If you are, too, then you most likely met me at ICAD 2006 and ICAD 2007. I presented a paper at ICAD 2007 on sonification of software slices. I used CSound in that research, and I continue using it for my current Ph.D. research. My advisor is Keith Gallagher.

As promised, I have updated my EZScore tool to process Chris Walshaw's "abc" textual music notation, and emit Csound score data. Well, actually, I threw EZScore away and started over, with much better results :-) The new version is called "abcsound", and can be found here: http://www.kneuro.net/ezscore.

Around nine months ago, I wrote a module called pcsets: Pitch Class Sets for Python. Since then, I've tried to improve it, but found it difficult to do so -- it seems like I actually got it right the first time. However, pcsets now has a derivative: I've adapted it to handle the base-13 Bohlen-Pierce scale.

I have revised my original Python converters for the Bohlen-Pierce scale. After reading more about the scale on The Bohlen-Pierce Site, I discovered there was already an existing tuning system standard.

In addition to my music on Jamendo, I'm also a member at ccMixter. A few weeks ago, I was excited to see some familiar names on ccMixter's front page -- notably the OLPC Berklee Sample Pool.

So there is already a connection between Csound and ccMixter! I'm about to build on that, by submitting some of my creations in a new collaborative project: Random Ambient

I'm posting here an instrument made using the pluck opcode (simulation of plucked strings or drum sounds). You will find a simple graphical environment to control the parameters. These are:

amp - amplitude [0-1]
cps - resampling frequency [1-10000 Hz]
icps - intended pitch value in Hz [20-1000 Hz]
meth - specific pluck methods [1-6]
1. simple averaging
2. stretched averaging
3. simple drum
4. stretched drum
5. weighted averaging
6. 1st order recursive filter, with coefs .5.
tempo - tempo for a pulse of 16th notes
parm1 - dependent on meth
parm2 - dependent on meth

Hi everyone, just joined. I'm interested in generally learning about computer synthesis; and more specifically, in using Csound to create backing tracks of different sorts for my own guitar and keyboard work. Also I've transcribed some choral music into Csound in order to facilitate learning it, and I'm in the process of writing a tool, EZScore, to make that transcription easier. Hopefully EZScore will also help in the production of original compositions :-) EZScore notation is something resembling standard musical notation denoted as ASCII text.