J. Knapka has been hard at work developing abcsound. I have actually taken it for more than one test drive. However, today, I completed a small scale compositional project using it. Not bad for an alpha stage module!

Now I understand. Realtime MIDI has my full attention.

Some people have not noticed yet, so I post here for a wider audience to see. Csound 5 is now present in Debian sid/unstable and in Ubuntu hardy and intrepid.
No need to compile from sources anymore! Hopefully csound will migrate to testing lenny once all dependencies have been built on all archs.

http://www.kneuro.net/abcsound/

This version supports keys, in theory at least, although it is not incredibly well-tested yet. It understands abc K: directives; also you can write any old gnarly key signature using this syntax in the abc file:

; The key of D major...
keysig G# C#

; The key of WTF?
keysig G# Ab Cb

Also c/ == c/2 now, as specified in the abc standard.

Cheers,

-- JK

For once, this will be a short article. Below, I've posted four simple bass instruments. I've been generating samples to use in Renoise (which, by the way, is available for Linux); I wanted a set of simple, but powerful bass sounds -- completely clean, and hugging the 16 bit maximum.

There is a new release of abcsound. Different URL this time: http://www.kneuro.net/abcsound/

I've added the ability to control pfield values within the abc score. There's also a somewhat whimsical tutorial page that explains how to use abcsound.py to generate .csd files, including multiple voices and pfield control.

Ciao, JK

A new release of abcsound is in the usual place: http://www.kneuro.net/ezscore. This version fixes repeats (again). It also implements default Q: and L: tags, and a simple default orchestra (a plucked instrument), so running

python abcsound.py someFile.abc > out.csd

I implemented abcsound by reference to Steve Mansfield's abc tutorial[1]. But upon reading the actual abc specification[2], I found that I had got a couple of things wrong. I have fixed two fairly major problems:

• The broken-rhythm notation "A>B", which should be interpreted as "A3/2B/2", is now working properly.
• Repeats should now be working properly, including alternate endings, which were hideously broken in the inital release.

As usual, abcsound can be found here: http://www.kneuro.net/ezscore/

Future work:

For anyone who would like to know:

Day gig: I work as a programmer and analyst in Baltimore, Maryland, US on large-scale IT projects.

Free-time substitute: I am working part-time on a Ph.D. by research at the University of Durham, England. Member of the ICAD community. If you are, too, then you most likely met me at ICAD 2006 and ICAD 2007. I presented a paper at ICAD 2007 on sonification of software slices. I used CSound in that research, and I continue using it for my current Ph.D. research. My advisor is Keith Gallagher.

The second instrument I've created for the Random Ambient collaboration uses pvanal and the opcode pvoc to resynthesize a heavy, single note drone from an original bagpipe sample.