This month at Designing Sound, we are focusing our lens on the concept of Audio Programming.
The above image is from David Padilla’s (AKA dabit) Banjo (here is the github link), which is a MIDI looper for live performance. He is a professional programmer (and an audio hobbyist) who’s work producing music within a programming language is quite impressive and academically intriguing. Though we do not all need to be professional programmers in order to be interested and involved in the process of audio programming. We, as sound designers, definitely have some additional tools and techniques to produce incredible and unique sound design through other (more user friendly) methods of programming as well.
Audio programming has always been a part of sound design in some form, though with the development of the more popular programs/languages such as Kyma, Max/MSP, and Pure Data (Pd), the world of audio programming continues to take an increasingly integral role in many of our workflows.
Whether you are a user of one or more of the above mentioned programming languages, a Csound expert, or are into another form of audio programming that is potentially less widely known or used. We would love to hear from you about your thoughts (and potentially tutorials) on how you use your favorite programming languages to produce your work.
Please email doron [at] this site to contribute an article for this month’s topic. And as always, please feel free to go “off-topic” as well.
Programing for Sound Design is a top level skill in my opinion, I always end up with a really big chain of virtual devices and generators to create my sounds, such flexibility and power would be hard to achieve in the analogue domain by two factors, money to have endless oscilators, generators, etc.
And the second issue is that some techniques can´t be achieved in the analogue domain.
It is true that the analogue instruments have a unique quality but we are getting close to emulate those qualities by means of physical modeling techniques, in the near future we will have the quality of analogue with the versatility of digital, what an exciting future that is!.
There is always going to be room for analogue devices in the studio of course, the more tools you have the better.
The problem with such music programing languages is the learning curve, it is not easy, it requires lots of theory and practice unlike a synth where you just need to tweak some knobs and get a result, it is hard work but the results could be as complex as your imagination and your cpu too lol.
I personally prefer a laptop with collider, c sound, kyma, max, pd, reaktor, and a nice DAW than having a couple of analogue synths I can do alot more with that set up and is what I use every day.
I have other analogue gear of course but if i have to choose, such laptop system would be my first choice.