Antonio De Luca's Csound page
My thoughts about Csound
At first sight, csound's straight forward data flow structure looked easy to work with.
I thought "Hey, it looks easy enough to pick up, make a couple instruments
here and there, I might even be able to make something musical with this". Well,
turned out to be a little harder than I thought. The Problem is you really want
to experiment with all these trippy effects but half the time you are waiting
for your composition to render. It is a pain. Also from reading a little from the csound book
it's not so easy. As i look deeper and deeper into the book, the csound language starts too look more
and more like a complex programming language. The common use of mathematical operations and variables.
You wonder how people remember every p-field column even if you use variables to organize them.
Regardless, I found the system to be very powerful, and I will use it again just because
I'm curious about some of the techniques i saw in the book.
My Composition, I entitle "Digital Cat"
I call it this because the my instrument sound resembles the sound made from a cat in heat except
synthesized. All the different components are not really coherent with each other, specifically my granular filter over the sample from the intro of a dead can dance
song "The Promised Womb" and two fm instruments.
ad01ap.orc
ad01ap.sco
I was trying to find a very mellow and solemn piece with wind instruments like chello's and violins because I
thought it would work well in a granular filter. I used the granular opcode with experimental parameters.
This achieved a very atmospheric sinister sounding piece. I was impressed at how effective the opcode was.
This is what you hear for most of the composition, but with some changes, sometimes shortening/lengthening
the amount of the sample used. I used a couple foscil instruments both influenced
by some of the designs i saw in the csound book. Both instruments are a little un-tamed because
I use some highly experimental exponential and linear ranges with expseg, and linseg as control input to the modulator,
and the carrier parameters. A sine wave function is used in both instances
Instrument 2 feeds a buzz output into the foscil opcode before final output.
I multiply the buzz output to a linear envelope and then add the foscil signal to this product.
Instrument 3 uses 2 foscil ops, one feeding into another to vary the amplitude of one channel.
The carrier and the modulator are still controlled by linear and exponential distributions.
Listen to my composition here
Just to let you know again, this is not meant to be musical. It is just an experiment.
email me