Computer Music

Inventor, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil appeared on I’ve Got a Secret in 1965, when he was 17 years old, demonstrating his music-composing computer.

Could you score a piece of music with 140 characters or less?

Supercollider 140 is a free album of Twitter music – audio pieces composed of Twitter-sized snippets of SuperCollider code.

It started as a curious project, when live coding enthusiast and Toplap member Dan Stowell started tweeting tiny snippets of musical code using SuperCollider. Pleasantly surprised by the reaction, and “not wanting this stuff to vanish into the ether” he has recently collated the best pieces into a special download for The Wire’s online readership here.

Many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you re-run the source code (the track titles) you get a new piece of music.

The compositions are self-referentially named, with titles like:

{LocalOut.ar(a=CombN.ar(BPF.ar(LocalIn.ar(2)
*7.5+Saw.ar([32,33],0.2),2**LFNoise0.kr(4/3,4)*
300,0.1).distort,2,2,40));a}.play//#supercollider

Tweet that and put it in your SuperCollider!

You can preview the album below, or download it at the Internet Archive:

Detailed artist biographies for the composers are available at The Wire.

via SuperCollider

Garageband: This basic GarageBand tutorial looks at how to reduce latency when you are recording.

via expertvillage

Want to get into electronic music, but you’re not sure where to start?

Well – you could do worse than reading the archives of Synthtopia and checking out Computer Music magazine’s Make Synth Music special.

I haven’t seen a copy of this yet, but it looks like it should be a good intro to synth music.

All the software you need is on the included disc, along with ten video tutorials .

Features:

• The history of synth music
• Synthesis fundamentals
• How to create classic riffs and cutting-edge sounds, step-by-step
• Free start-up synth kit – everything you need to create your own sounds with your PC or Mac
• Ten exclusive CM video tutorials on disc

Cakewalk has published an interesting look at Windows 7 for audio production:

Q: In what ways has Windows 7 been optimized, in terms of performance, for audio production?

A: Windows 7 on the surface is very similar to Windows Vista. It has the same audio driver support and same audio system infrastructure as Vista. However it’s some of the under hood improvements that are more significant for audio production. There are some interesting innovations and optimizations in the Windows kernel, making the OS more scalable for concurrent processing. This makes it attractive for highly multithreaded applications like SONAR. Additionally there are various new API’s/SDK’s that may be of significance to developers.

The article goes into exquisitely geeky detail, so it’s worth a read if you’re running Windows.

See, too, Peter Kirn’s equally geektacular Window 7 OS-porn at CDM.