This presentation will look at the current state of the upcoming Csound 7. It will cover planned changes to the language such as explicit types, user-defined data structures, and new-style user-defined opcodes, discussing in detail their design and rationale.  It will look also both look at how features in Csound 6 made way for Csound 7, as well as how new features planned in Csound 7 will make way for goals in Csound 8.  The goal of the presentation will be both to inform the user community of planned changes as well as seek feedback to help shape the future of the system and language.

This paper presents recent developments integrating Csound with HTML and JavaScript. Csound can now run in an interactive Web page, using all the capabilities of current Web browsers: custom widgets, 2- and 3-dimensional animated and interactive graphics canvases, video, data storage, WebSockets, Web Audio, mathematics typesetting, etc. Above all, the JavaScript programming language can be used to control Csound, extend its capabilities, generate scores, and more.

Patching environments presented in software such as Pure Data, AudioMulch and Max/MSP seem to attract a far higher percentage of computer music novices than traditional text based compilers. So how would Csound fare if presented in such an environment? The latest version of Cabbage attempts to find out. Cabbage Studio is a new Csound based DAW that provides users with a fully functional patching interface and development environment. Users can edit the audio graph on the fly where each node in the graph can be either a Csound instrument, or a 3rd party audio plugin.

This presentation will take a closer look at Cabbage and introduce a number of lesser known Cabbage features, extended techniques and esoteric approaches to instrument design. It will show that Cabbage can offer innovative approaches to user interaction that go beyond those provided by most plug-ins. This can extend beyond just a means of user input to methods of visualising Csound's mechanisms and a redefinition of the scope of a Csound csd.

Computer Music is a field that is now almost sexagenarian. Since the early days of Max Mathews Bell Labs experiments, it has evolved a symbiotic relationship between the artistic and the scientific. In a way, it is the former that gives meaning to the latter, and the latter that allows the former to move forward. Because of this, composers who want to engage solidly with the field need to come to terms with both aspects of Computer Music. For this, there is an emerging set of skills and craft that is becoming the basis for his or her education. These are very different to the ones normally gained in a traditional `conservatory’ musical training, although the two are not mutually-exclusive and can coexist very well. In some places, a very common practice has been of composers employing technicians to create the electronic or computer parts for their music. Although, as a creative-collaborative effort, this might have its merits, it is often the case that the motivation has more to do with the lack of skills from the `composer’, than a inherent desire in the cooperative endeavour. This mode of operation is very dated, and we have every right to expect that a computer musician will have to learn the tools of his/her trade. Thus, it is high time we face to the task of developing in well-defined way what a Gradus ad Parnassum for Computer Music could be, and how Csound can contribute to it.

The basic concepts and the new algorithms that are used in Csound6 in order to enhance performance via parallelism are described in some detail. The hope is that this will assist users in determining when this technology is advantageous, and in how to write instruments that are suited to this level of parallelism. The talk ends with a short consideration of how the scheme could be improved.

The “Csound On Stage Musical Operator” (COSMO) project brings the sound processing language Csound to a portable, standalone musical device in a stomp box guitar pedal format. This pedal is designed for live performances on stage and allows an easy integration of customized Csound based effects into an existing live-electronic setup (Ervik et al., 2013). Inside the COSMO box, a Raspberry Pi micro-computer is running Csound 6.0 (Csound Python API) with a custom designed pre-assembled circuit board (Hardware Attached on Top, C-HAT), which is mounted to the Raspberry Pi GPIO socket. C-HAT allows to connect up to eight free assignable foot-switches, knobs and LEDs from the front panel of pedal to the Raspberry Pi. Though, the COSMO pedal is originally designed along the lines of a classic guitar effect pedal, the C-HAT allows to connect any type of analog control inputs (sensors, expression pedals etc.), as well as an array of LEDs. The C-HAT furthermore, supports a MIDI-In and MIDI-Out connection, which makes the COSMO device more flexible for applications like a standalone Csound based synthesizer or for interactive sound installations. A concept for a beginner workshop has been developed which foresees to build the COSMO device and explains the basics of Csound effect programming to the participants in a two-day schedule. Being able to provide the pre assembled C-HAT board reduced the amount of soldering in a workshop by one day. This presentation will give an overview about the COSMO project and will outline the workshop concept.

Auditory displays present information through sound. As part of an auditory display, the process of rendering information and interaction as sound is called sonification. Sonification can take many forms and be applied to many different problems: from understanding radiation through the clicks from a Geiger counter to developing the complex sound language presenting information in some computer games today. The study of sonification is very developed and a scientific community with expertise in sound synthesis, big data, user interaction, computer science and cognition (among others!) has gathered together around it.

This paper descirbes the system configuration for the piece that was played at Csound Conference 2013 and for the revised piece with audio and visual feedback to audience. The piece played at Csound Conference 2013 is based on the data sent from audience by using their own smartphones or tablets without having to install any dedicated app. The system uses a WiFi router for accepting connection from each participant, and a Linux laptop that runs Csound and lighttpd. By performing XMLHttpRequest data transmissions from the smartphone browsers, OSC message is generated by a PHP script to control Csound. The revised system that includes processing by HTML5 Web Audio API and Websocket that were added to enhance feedback to each participant is also described.

This paper describes [self.], an open source art installation that embodies artificial intelligence (AI) in order to learn, react, and respond to stimuli from its immediate environment. Biologically inspired models are implemented to achieve this behavior, and Csound is used for most parts of the audio processing involved in the system. The artificial intelligence is physically represented by a robot head, built on a modified moving head for stage lighting. Everything but the motors of the stage lighting unit was removed and a projector, camera and microphones added. No form of knowledge or grammar have been implemented in the AI, the system starts in a ‘tabula rasa’ state and learns everything via its own sensory channels, forming categories in a bottom-up fashion. The robot recognizes sounds and faces, and is able to recognize similar sounds, link them with the corresponding faces, and use the knowledge of past experiences to form new sentences. Since the utterances of the AI is solely based on audio and video items it has learned from the interaction with people, an insight into the learning process (i.e. what it has learned from who) can be glimpsed. This collage-like composition has guided several design choices regarding the aesthetics of the audio and video output. This paper will focus on the audio processes of the system, herein audio recording, segmentation, analysis, processing and playback.

The main idea behind Knuth and Alma is the development of a simple live-electronic setup for a speaker. It follows the german child song "Ich geh mit meiner Laterne", which describes a couple of a child and a lantern. For the speaker, their lantern is a small loudspeaker; small enough to be carried and to be put on the table, beneath the speaker when they read a text, large enough to be a counterpart to the human voice. Although the setup is the same for both, Knuth and Alma focus on quite different aspects of spoken language, and output quite different sounds. Knuth analyzes the rhythm of the language and triggers pre-recorded samples of any sound, whereas Alma recalls parts of the speaker's past and does not use any other sound except the speaker's live input itself. Author will first describe the two models and their implementation in Csound, then he will discuss some use cases and future possibilities.

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