csound VS overtone

Nobody has mentioned Csound.

Thank you so much for your appreciation ! I'm planning a blog post abou that... but, meanwhile: I use the following free software: 1) Huygens Fokker Scala to tune files (see below which ones); 2) SynthFont (in combination with soundfonts) to play the files tuned by Scala; The files in 1) are text files essentially representing pitches and durations. I set them up by means of an electronic spreadsheet :) Here's a link to Huygens Fokker Scala: http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/ The underlying logic is definitely an "abc" one, rather than WYSIWYG. I'm still working under Windows, but I'm trying to switch to Linux, so I could need to replace Scala (which still doesn't install smoothly on recent distros) by Csound: https://csound.com/ 🙂 (Scala doesn't install smoothly on recent Linux distros).

Pure Data, cSound, and SuperCollider are all free and opensource. Incredible possibility, though the learning curb can be steep.

For fun, I took a class in computer music. I still did not know what a synthesizer was. Once class got under way, we started using this archaic horrible piece of software, Csound. Not long into the class, it finally kind of dawned on me that synths exist, what they are and how they work, and I started buying gear. Once I had gear, I really really hated Csound, and I wound up dropping the class (Covid had something to do with that). A lot of things started to make sense (Regular Show, for instance) and I got really interested in sound design.

CSound looks interesting: https://csound.com

csound would be interesting to play with.

> Midi being an “artist” tool places it more as a medium like paint.

I’ve used MIDI “as paint”.

Written music using code to MIDI(1), and wrote “cross instrument” music, ie using my keyboard as drum machine.

But these days MIDI is chiefly an archival method for me.

Every time I touch my keyboard is recorded, is much smaller than a comparable audio recording, by design “forced fidelity” in the recording, and I am able to pipe the MIDI format through transcription software (which would be near impossible from an audio recording today).

(1) http://overtone.github.io/

I've never actually used it myself. I've preferred systems that talk to SuperCollider, like overtone, because it's already rock solid and has lots of good DSP built in.

Thanks. I don't know to what extend its "better-because-of-clojure" but I also found overtone https://github.com/overtone/overtone which should be good fun (though the underlying synthesizer is supercollider/C++).

You might want to look at Overtone, which is a clojure environment built on top of overtone, and which integrates with processing and a few other similar things.

https://overtone.github.io/

> I'm fluent in Python but find the use of colons is the real sticking point.

The you'd probably have hated its predecessor which was all about the parentheses: https://overtone.github.io/

It's too bad that superficial stuff like which characters you need to type is holding you back. Getting used to Ruby when you're familiar with Python is no big deal. I would just stick with it

There's a project you may find interesting: https://overtone.github.io/. Besides sound/synthesis stuff, it has https://github.com/overtone/midi-clj library, which allows you to write MIDI as lisp (Clojure, to be precise) code. Emacs has great support for Clojure programming (via Cider), and REPL-based development is perfect for writing music.