Next: Csound Granular Synthesis opcode Up: Appendices Previous: Physical Modelling Synthesis Contents
Csound is a computer programming language for dealing with sound, also known as a sound compiler or an audio programming language. It is called Csound because it is written in the C programming language, as opposed to some of its predecessors.
Csound was originally written at MIT by Barry Vercoe, based on an earlier language called Music360, developed by Max Mathews at Bell Labs. It is free software, available under the LGPL. Its development continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s, led by John ffitch at the University of Bath, resulting in the launch of Csound 5 in February, 2005.
Many developers have contributed to it, most notably Istvan Varga, Gabriel Maldonado (who developed a variant of the system, CsoundAV, which includes image and graphics processing extras), Robin Whittle, Richard Karpen, Michael Gogins, Matt Ingalls, Steven Yi and Victor Lazzarini.
Csound takes two specially formatted text files as input. The orchestra describes the nature of the instruments and the score describes notes and other parameters along a timeline. Csound processes the instructions in these files and renders an audio file or real-time audio stream as output.