SuperCollider, Algorithms that Sound, Practicum

As I stare at the beginning of another Summer, this time with a toddler and a pandemic both raging nearby, I have set a few goals which I’m attempting to line up so they inform and help fulfill each other. First, don’t get COVID 19. Second, the rest. Here’s some of it.

I will create a few blog posts detailing different useful algorithms I get asked about quite a bit. These are mostly heuristics and useful for the realization of compelling sounds in the pure synthesis domain. They mostly fall outside the capital-letter practices (such as Modulation) or are a sub-genre or mish-mash of these better-known concepts. They will be familiar to the practiced computer musician. For the novice or tinkerer, they should find a place in your toolbox.

The algorithms are often ones I am exploring to complete or inform my own creative practice, so they are useful in that way as well.

In the end, perhaps, when there are a number of these posts I may consider forming a loose subject-narrative, bind them all together and release them as some sort of computer music text. (Is there an ‘EP’ equivalent to the ‘LP’ in the writing world?)

The first post along these lines will appear soon and concerns the creation of spectrograms for pedagogical purposes. (How on-brand.) I will be demonstrating different ways to automate the recording of SuperCollider code in a production stream that also includes the creation of a spectrogram of said sounds for use in these very posts as well as for demonstration/teaching purposes. As usual, I will focus on open-source and command-line (CLI) tools as much as possible as these scale better with batch (bulk) processes.

NOTE: the side-effects to reading the posts described above *may* include a curiosity for things #linux and an interest in noise music in general.

Stay tuned, and stay healthy.