supercollider VS csound

At this point, we can produce the array of pitches that are midi notes. To create sound from these notes I've used a specialized programming language called SuperCollider. I won't dive much into details here, but you may have a look at the code if you're interested. Beware, there are quite a lot of branches there and all of them contain some interesting code.

This is essentially sound design from first principles. There's a good book here: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Sound-Press-Andy-Farnell/dp... Note that the software used (Pure Data) can be replaced by another high-level language (SuperCollider: https://supercollider.github.io/) pretty easily. I know of no "tool" to do what you want because there are few things that are universal to different kinds of natural and unnatural sound. (Note: study acoustics and psycho-acoustics to better understand why the former is true.)

Since then, I've been working more and more with TidalCycles. TidalCycles is an open-source live coding framework for creating patterns written in Haskell. TidalCycles uses SuperCollider on the backend, another language I've been using for live coding. Recently, I started using Tidal Looper for live vocal processing. This blog post will walk you through what you need to get started with vocal looping with Tidal Looper.

Link to the audio programming language / server they're using in the article: https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider

For the intrepid, especially those annoyed with the purported input-sluggishness of musescore et al, an interesting text-based alternative is LilyPond https://lilypond.org/

My dad wrote an opera using LilyPond in vim, though I believe these days he's actually doing more with supercollider, which skips sheetmusic and goes right to sounds: https://supercollider.github.io/

Weirdly enough,I got into programming through music. I got into making experimental electronic music and ended up learning SuperCollider. Figured I’d have to get a real job at some point and I liked learning Supercollider enough that I figured I should try to go back to school and learn some more useful programming languages

So you’re wondering what would making music with code look like? The tools I’m familiar with are TidalCycles, Sonic Pi, and SuperCollider. I’m having a hard time describing what it’s like to make music with tools like these so here’s a video of a performance. One person is live coding the music and the other is live coding the visuals. I think it’s super cool how the music is improvised and built over time by layering commands. Some keywords you could search to see more examples would be Algorave and Livecoding.

So far mostly Vim (not for coding, just writing so far), NetHack, Firefox, and mpd and ncmpcpp. Also mpv occasionally. I'm planning on installing SuperCollider at some point too and getting back into that, but that shouldn't be too heavy either.

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.