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From: cook@roger (Doug Cook 756-1460)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Csound and synthesis books
Message-ID: <13270@aggie.ucdavis.edu>
Date: 14 Jun 91 20:09:20 GMT
References: <1991Jun13.210000.1@cc.helsinki.fi>
Sender: usenet@aggie.ucdavis.edu
Reply-To: cook@roger (Doug Cook 756-1460)
Organization: Music Department, UC Davis
Lines: 29

In article <1991Jun13.210000.1@cc.helsinki.fi> jalkio@cc.helsinki.fi writes:
>Are there any books on Csound or software music synthesis and algorithms
>in general? Reading the Csound docs is a bit "experimental" if you have
>stepped to this kind of system from commercial hardware synthesizers :-)

You might check out Richard Moore's recent book; I believe it's titled
_Fundamentals_of_Computer_Music_, or something very similar to that. It's a 
plug for cmusic, which is Moore's own software synthesis environment. A 
classic book on software synthesis is by Dodge and Jerse, the title of which
escapes me at the moment. That book has examples in Music V, upon which 
Csound is based.

>I thought that Csound is "the best" but then I heard that it isn't so
>spectacular.

Csound has a lot of power if you have the time and patience to sit down and 
use it. However, it's frequently a pain in the butt to use. It's sort of like 
programming in a musical version of FORTRAN. But it definitely gets the job
done; one of my recent compositions was a four-minute quadraphonic piece 
realized with four 105,000-note Csound scores (a max of 885 sounds per channel
per second). Try that with MIDI and you'll quickly discover why people still
use Csound despite its quirks.

	-Doug

Doug Cook				|"Much is being said, my lords,
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and CS	| but nothing is being done."
University of California		| 		-Jeff Beck
Davis, CA				|