I was thinking recently about an article by Jonathan Fildes, you may have seen on the internet, about the discovery of the first recording of computer music from 1951. The article was about the Ferranti Mark 1 computer at Manchester University, and the existing recordings of "God Save the King", "Baa Baa Black Sheep", and "In the Mood" which predate the Bell Labs IBM mainframe from 1957.
This made me think about the historical significance of computer code. For example, do I need a Ferranti Mark 1 computer to play the original music, or can I just render the code and create the historical sounds on my laptop? I would love to have a copy of Music 360 or Music 11 and be able to somehow make sounds using the original programs on a modern computer. For me, that would be listening to history.
I had Csound version 2 on my laptop for some time until it ceased to work after a recent operating system upgrade. Version 2 was before Perf, and there were 8 GEN routines. I miss being able to get version 2 to work, because it gave me a tingle to play a simple oscillator with version 2 and listen to the sound of history as the original code was compiled and rendered into audio.
This is our twelfth issue of Csound Journal, and this edition features the interesting articles "Implementing Frequency Warping" with the use of GRM Tools and Max frontends by Peiman Khosravi, and "Cross Frequency Modulation" emphasizing plugin opcodes by François Pinot. Very useful from the user's perspective Joachim Heintz writes about "Tuning Your MIDI Keyboard", and my own article looks at sample replacement employing Steven Yi's vaget and vaset opcodes. Also in this issue Jacob Joaquin's "GEN Instruments" article presents a novel and interesting approach to coding data for stored function tables. We hope you enjoy reading this issue, and look forward to your submissions for the next issue.
James Hearon
I'm always amazed and inspired by what my fellow Csound users are developing and exploring in sound and music. The articles in this issue cover a lot of ground: alternate tunings, frequency warping, low-level sample manipulation, user-defined GEN routines, and cross-FM synthesis. Many thanks to the authors for spending the time to put together these fine articles to share with the community. I hope you will find the wide range of topics as interesting and thought provoking as I have!
Steven Yi