Adam Boulanger gave Aurelius Prochazka and I a three hours introductory tutorial on csound.
Csound is a programming language -originally witten in C, ref. its name- by Barry Vercoe at MIT Media Lab. Synthesized sounds that come out of csound are elegant and allow anyone with a computer to freely compose sounds. I prefer it to reason for its infinite personal potentials.
Composer Richard Boulanger edited the famous Csound book. BT on the other end revisited csound taught by Dr Boulanger for his Binary Universe album.
Saying that, all I can say is tested and approved and I can share some of the notes I took, as I think it can help anyone start with the Csound software and compose music.
sr = 44100
kr = 4410
ksmps = 10
nchnls = 1
instr 1
kamp = 10000
kcps = 220
ifn = 1
a1 oscil kamp, kcps, ifn
out a1
endin
; Table #1, a sine wave table with a small amount of data.
f 1 0 4096 10 1; Play Instrument #1, the basic oscillator, for
; two seconds. This should sound relatively rough.
i 1 0 2
e
icon, your piece will play back.10 is the gene routine number. 4096, a power of two. it drastically changes the sound if 4096 becomes 8!
In file:///Library/Frameworks/CsoundLib.framework/Versions/5.1/Resources/Manual/ScoreGenRef.html
the gene routines are explained.
i: means instrument
1: refered to the instrument 1 from the orchestra window
0: start
2: duration in seconds
3: frequency(then you can add different instruments, that overlap in time or start at different times etc…)
. foscil (A basic frequency modulated oscillator.)
. grain (Generates granular synthesis textures)
. grain2 (Easy-to-use granular synthesis texture generator.)
. soundin (Reads audio data from an external device or stream)
. physical modeling instrument: pluck (Produces a naturally decaying plucked string or drum sound.)
I Personally prefer reaktor (from native instruments). It of course implies a different gui metaphor (namely that of a modular synth, somewhat similar to Max/MSP etc), or if you can live with a computer/hardware hybrid system Clavia’s Nord Modular.
But both of these are commercial (like reason…)
best
timh