The Mysterious World of Csound
October 6, 2019Six months ago when I started to learn Csound I struggled to wrap my head around what exactly it was and what people were doing with it. At the most basic level I knew it could be used to make strange sounds, but even after I read online documentation, read the first chapters of Csound textbooks, and watched YouTube videos, I still had unanswered questions.
- How many people are using Csound?
- What are they doing with it?
- Where can you find it under the hood in software/hardware applications?
- Is this a ubiquitous language in the music world, or is it an obscure language only used by a cultish group of practioners?
I just couldn't figure out the broader picture of the Csound world. There’s no central directory of Csound users, compositions, projects, or products. The official Csound website does have a list of some Csound projects and links to SoundCloud and Bandcamp tracks tagged with #csound, but 1) these lists of projects and tracks are not comprehensive and 2) there’s almost no context provided to make sense of what you see or hear.
Do a search for Csound on YouTube. You’ll find many videos, but they feel like odds and ends, an assortment of compositions, live performances, tutorials, and lectures, most with very low production quality. When I first started learning Csound I looked at these videos to see if there were any good instructional series or examples of interesting music being made. Instead, I got the impression that Csound is an obscure language without an organized user community generating content for the newcomer.
Further contributing to the sense of obscurity is that there is no official online forum for Csound. There’s an active listserv [EDIT - the listserv has mostly moved to the Csound forum] which is archived as a quasi-forum that looks like it’s straight out of the 1990’s. It’s quite helpful, but I didn’t join it until a month ago. Googling to find solutions to Csound problems is very hit or miss. Despite the fact that it is one of the oldest, most developed languages for music there’s just not the critical mass of Q&A’s or tutorials available online like there are for other languages.
I’ve learned that you have to be persistent if you want to wrap your head around Csound. The Csound FLOSS Manual acknowledges “It is often difficult to find up to date resources that show and explain what is possible with Csound. Documentation and tutorials produced by developers and experienced users tend to be scattered across many different locations.” This has been true in my experience. I’ve had to scrounge around for any information I can get to piece together an understanding of Csound. In fact, at the International Csound Conference that just ended in Italy, members of the Csound Development Round Table issued a resolution to make Csound more approachable for newcomers. This is very promising!
The longer I spend learning Csound the more I understand what people are actually doing with it. For example, after adopting Cabbage last month as a Csound development environment I’m seeing that people are designing VST plugins with Csound under the hood that can be used in DAWs like Ableton Live and Reaper. It also looks like game developers use Csound as an audio engine. People have also developed interactive music apps with Csound under the hood. Csound is even in the physical modular world in units like the QU-Bit Nebulae.
That’s as much as I understand at the moment. I’m sure over time my understanding of where Csound exists will expand. If you’re new to Csound, stick with it. It’ll all start to make more sense. In the meantime, the Csound developers and user community are thinking about how to make Csound more approachable for newcomers.
In my next post I’ll describe the most helpful resources I’ve found to learn Csound.