/csound-expression

Haskell Framework for Electronic Music

Primary LanguageHaskellBSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" LicenseBSD-3-Clause

Csound-expression guide

Join the chat at https://gitter.im/anton-k/csound-expression

Welcome to the simplest textual synthesizer.

> dac $ osc 440

Csound-expression is a Haskell framework for computer music. With the help of the library we can create our instruments on the fly. A couple of lines in the interpreter is enough to get the cool sound going out of your speakers. It can be used for simple daily sound-file processing or for a full-blown live performances. It's available on Hackage.

Let's look at how we can create computer music with Haskell.

Appendix:

WARNING: the library works best within ghci. The real-time sound rendering function dac spawns a child process in the background which may continue to execute after you stop the main process that runs the programm. It's not so in vim but it happens in the Sublime Editor and when you invoke runhaskell. So the best is to write you program in the separate file and then load it in the ghci and invoke the function main (which runs the sound rendering with the function dac).

News

The 4.8.3 is out! New features:

This is a very important release to me. It tries to solve the problem present in the most open source music-production libraries. It's often the pack of beautiful sounds/timbres is missing. User is presented with many audio primitives but no timbres are present to show the real power of the framework. This release solves this problem. See the friend package csound-catalog on Hackage. It defines 200+ beautiful instruments ready to be used.

The csound-expression defines a new type called Patch for description of an instrument with a chain of effects. It's good place to start the journey to the world of music production.

There are new functions for synchronized reaction on events. The triggering of events can be synchronized with given BPM.

There examples are fixed and should work.

The library is updated for GHC-7.10!

The 4.8.2 is out! New features:

This release improves oscillators in many ways. Adds phase control to many standard oscillators. There are functions to detune oscillator and create unisions of oscillators (multioscillators or chorus effect).

Adds support for randomly generating events (with random frequency).

The 4.8 is out! New features:

A multitap looper is implemented (see Csound.Air.Looper). It's a powerful widget with lots of controls. We can create unlimited number of taps. And the length of the loops doesn't have to be the same for all taps. We can insert effects and even external controllers. And all this is packed as a simple function that produces a widget and the output signal. Three types of loopers are available one is for raw signal inputs, another for midi instruments and the last one is for soundfonts. You can see it in action at youtube.

There are lots of new step sequencers available. Pre 4.8 step sequencers could only produce signals with equal time segments but new step sequencers can play a tiny melodies. The API of temporal-media is supported for step sequencers (see Csound.Air.Envelope). There is a new type called Seq. It's for step sequencers that can play monophonic melodies.

There is a type class for humanization of envelopes. It works for linseg and step sequencers. It adds some amount of randomness to durations or values (see Csound.Air.Envelope HumanValue and HumanTime).

A midi chooser ui-box was implemented (see Csound.Air.Live, hmidiChooser, uiMidi). It makes it easy to choose a midi instrument among several alternatives. There are stand alone widgets and widgets implemented as an effect-box.

The class Compose from temporal-media package was broken to two classes: Harmony (with function hor) and Melody (with function mel).

The 4.7 is out! New features:

The Scores are redesigned! The low level CsdEventList is substituted with more advanced and flexible type Sco. The instruments are triggered not with pairs or triplets (individual events) but with scores!

The lib now depends on common APIs for delaying and composing values. There are common type classes for composition.

There is a simple API for composition of samples, notes and signal segments. The mel plays units sequentially, The hor plays units at the same time. The del delays the unit by given amount of time, The lim limits the unit in time. the loop creates infinite loops. The loopBy creates finite loops. The list of all functions can be found in the package temporal-media. See the module Temporal.Class.

I need to update the guide for changes!

The 4.6 is out! New features:

  • Granular delays and effects (see Csound.Air.Granular)

  • It's possible to create tables not only for reading but also for writing. We can create sound buffers (see newTab and newGlobalTab in the module Csound.Tab).

  • Hyper Vectorial Synthesis (HVS). Easy to use functions for HVS (see Csound.Air.Hvs) With HVS we can control lots of parameters with a couple of sliders. The HVS can reduce the size of control parameters by interpolating between snapshots of parameters.

  • New spectral functions for spectral fusion: crossSpecFilter and crossSpecVocoder (see Csound.Air.Spec)

  • New effect for playing input samples in segments (back and forth) trackerSplice (original design by Rory Walsh). With it we can extract segments of live audio and repeat them or play in reverse.

The 4.5 is out! New features:

  • Easy to use granular synthesis (see Csound.Air.Granular)

  • Support for opcode mincer. It's possible to scale pitch and tempo of audio files independently (see Csound.Air.Wav ram reading functions).

The 4.4 is out! New features:

  • Signal segments. With signal segments we can schedule audio signals with event streams. We can limit audio signals with clicks of the buttons or some other live events. We can retrigger samples, play them in sequence and perform many more actions shich are tied to the event streams.

  • Triggering samples with keyboard and midi-events (see Csound.Air.Sampler).