Supercollider

Zangetsu

Hey all,

Having problems figuring out what the hell supercollider is actually used for. From what I can tell you can synthesize sounds and sequences, but what advantage is that over any softsynth/daw?

Cheers

studiorat

You can make your own synthesizers and sequencers with it.

It's mostly used for teaching people how to code for music etc. or create programs for realtime synthesis or algorithmic composition. Handy for making one off weirdness that may use unusual controllers or the like, not much good at "makin' phat beatz". It uses it's own language SCLang and I presume it has a compiler or something to run that code on, same as Csound or Chuck.

Looks a bit like this

// modulate a sine frequency and a noise amplitude with another sine
// whose frequency depends on the horizontal cursor position
{ 
        var x = SinOsc.ar(MouseX.kr(1, 100));
        SinOsc.ar(300 * x + 800, 0, 0.1) 
        + 
        PinkNoise.ar(0.1 * x + 0.1) 
}.play;

It's also free and open source.

If they are advantages I really couldn't say. Unless you have a bit of experience in coding or someone to show you I'd leave it for the moment. If you must, I'd say try a graphical environment like Pd or Sonicbirth, textbased wise I'd go Csound or Chuck. There's more of a Csound community in Ireland afaik, 3 people maybe :-)

Zangetsu

Hahaha ok cool thanks studiorat, I've done a little coding in the past so its not completely unfamiliar. I'm looking to skip a few years of a degree course and have been told a little knowledge of this would help. May as well give it a shot!

Much appreciated

GTE

http://www.somasa.qub.ac.uk/~mgurevich/mte2007/?page_id=172

Hope this helps.

jtsuited

studiorat wrote: »

There's more of a Csound community in Ireland afaik, 3 people maybe :-)

i'd go as far as far as to say maybe 5 or 6.:D

a few years back in college we had a conference and had Boulanger and Barry Vercoe at it (and the rest of the church of Csound - ffitch and all those dudes). Some of the uber-geeks flown in from the US universities had taken the whole Csound thing to ridiculous levels.........i'll be honest i thought that whole world was a bit daft before I saw the stuff they were doing with it. mindblowing.

studiorat

jtsuited wrote: »

i'd go as far as far as to say maybe 5 or 6.:D

Ah I know, I was just messing, victor and those boys are pretty deep into it. I haven't gone near Csound or programming in general in a year or so. Kept with the Pd thing though, using if for sending video over a network at the mo. Need to figure out a way of sending some sort of MIDI sync at the same time too, to lock two DAWS together.

I also see there's notes for processing in that link bbk stuck up, that's handy. I'll be havin' those!

Just looking at the SC code I posted there it looks a little more codey with the arrays and so forth. I can't remember does csound use them? I know I used them calling the library on it's own.

GTE

bbk wrote: »

http://www.somasa.qub.ac.uk/~mgurevich/mte2007/?page_id=172

Hope this helps.

I find the link below to be much better quality learning then the above (even with the class time I had with it).

http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/nc81/courses/cm1/sccourse.zip

You can open it in your web browser to have a read through or copy and paste it into Supercollider (or open it in SC) and play, manipulate and understand better the examples given.

Anima

No Csound doesn't use arrays if i remember correctly. You use function tables which are basically the same.

Supercollider can be programmed in real-time without recompiling like Csound. Chuck is real-time as well. This has benefits but usually more CPU intensive. However theres great freedom in being able to test things quickly.

With any of these environments, if you take the time to really learn them you can basically come up with anything you like and fast. Theres plenty of things you can do that aren't possible with regular DAWs and plugins.