Machine Tongues XV: Three Packages for Software Sound Synthesis

TLDR

Modern computer music originated with the Music V family of software sound synthesis systems, evolving from batch processing of instrument definitions and score lists to a renewed interest driven by powerful personal workstations and the widespread use of portable C‑language SWSS tools such as cmix, cmusic, and Csound. This article examines software sound synthesis technology and compares the three prominent C‑language systems—cmix, cmusic, and Csound. The paper is organized into three sections: an introduction to SWSS with progressive examples, a comparison of the three systems using identical instrument/score examples, and informal benchmark tests on Sun SPARCstation‑2 and Next TurboCube hardware with subjective evaluations of language and environment features.

Abstract

The origin of the technology and methodology of modern computer music is certainly the Music V family of software sound synthesis systems developed since the late 1950s. In the “old days,” this consisted of batch computer processing of musical programs expressed in terms of instrument definitions (programs) and score note lists (input data), generating sampled sound output data to off-line storage for later performance. The noticeable rekindling of interest in programs and languages for software sound synthesis (SWSS) and software digital audio signal processing (DSP) using general-purpose computers is due to a number of factors, not least among them the dramatic increase in the power of personal workstations over the last five years. There are currently three widely-used, portable, C-language SWSS tools: (in alphabetical order) cmix (Lansky 1990), cmusic (Moore 1990), and Csound (Vercoe 1991). This article will discuss the technology of SWSS and then present and compare these three systems. It is divided into three parts; the first introduces SWSS in terms of progressive examples. Part two compares the three systems using the same two instrument/score examples written in each of them. The final section presents informal benchmark tests of the systems run on two different hardware platforms—a Sun Microsystems SPARCstation-2 IPX and a Next Computer Inc. TurboCube machine—and subjective comments on various features of the languages and programming environments of stateof-the-art SWSS software. This author’s connection with this topic is that of extensive experience with several different SWSS systems over the last 15 years, starting with MUS10 and including all three compared here: Csound (in the form of Music-11 initially) at the CMRS studio in Salzburg (Pope 1982); cmusic in the CARL environment at PCS/Cadmus computers in Munich (Pope 1986); and more recently a combination of cmix, Csound, and various vocoder software packages with user interfaces written in Smalltalk-80 at the CCRMA Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University (Pope