Super Collider

I've been really into synthesized music lately. Perhaps I mean to say something a bit more specific than that. I've been really into Joy Electric lately and that has got me watching synthesizer tutorial videos on Youtube, trying to understand these wonderful blurpy sounds.

Synthesizers, such as those made my Roland or Moog, are expensive. And large. I just recently bought an Alesis Firewire mixer, and wouldn't be able to justify buying a new piece of hardware.

There are several software synthesizer emulators available, I'm sure. But they would probably cost money. Thankfully I came across Nyquist and SuperCollider. SuperCollider and Nyquos both are interactive interpreter environments for coding synthesizers based on sine waves and saw waves, etc.

Nyquist is a project of a professor at Carnegie Mellon. Because the language Nyquist has a Lisp-like syntax, I got kinda bored with it quickly. As much as I love functional languages, I don't naturally think that way. Or something. Nyquist files can also be played in Audacity, which is nice.

SuperCollider's language, on the otherhand, is imperative. It uses the Open Sound Control API instead of MIDI. I also like the interface a little bit better than Nyquist. Plus the Cmd-Shift-? key sequence for in-program documentation is quite useful.

Right now I'm wading through the intro tutorials to Super Collider. I'm so eager to figure this stuff out! Being able to take a Sine Oscillater and pass another Sine Oscillator in to control the frequency of the first oscillator: now that's cool! There are also exponential functions, line functions. I need to learn how to sequence all these things together to make a song, now that I've learned how to make basic blurps.

My Eno-inspired goal is to make some sort of generative music: music that makes itself based on random events.

Instead of pining for my very own analog synthesizer, I'm going to head down this path of open-source frequency generators. Programming my computer will probably be more flexible than programming a piece of hardware.



Both are free downloads. Both are available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
SuperCollider link: http://supercollider.sourceforge.net
Nyquist link: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~music/music.software.html