I've been playing with blue - Steven Yi's Java front end to Csound. I'm finding it to be a very inspiring solution to the tedious work flow typical of Csound composition with scripts, that of the compile, render, listen, compile, render, listen cycle.
blue lets the composer establish an object-oriented vision of her scripts in such a way that Cmask can be used (or any script, python or rhino) in a smaller way, allowing for parts of scripts to be isolated in a manner more conducive to musical/textural thinking. blue is essentially a pre-compiler for Csound .csd files.
It was only after attending a 2 hour presentation by Steven Yi at NYU, and seeing how he uses his system to control complexity that I realized just how useful it could be. A particularly interesting scripting facility that Yi has written for himself though a Jython scripting system was a way of encapsulating an orchestral performance paradigm. He can pass to this system, after the appropriate 'inits' one note, which will then be rendered by a virtual ensemble with tiny onset diffs and intonation diffs, producing a marvelous facsimile of the chorussing effect that orchestral ensembles achieve.
More about blue later as I discover how it can effect my computer music workflow.
Posted by jeff at December 27, 2003 05:07 PM