Reflections on the 2017 Csound Conference
I am now relaxing after the Csound conference, which was very intense. And very rewarding. I feel that I was able both to give, and to receive. I give my profound thanks to Luis Jure and Martin Rocamora, the other organizers of the conference, the staff who made it all happen, and to the Uruguayan institutions who supported the conference with some very nice venues.
One thing that always concerns me about Csound is not the capabilities or the quality of the code, or the quality of the music made with Csound, or the quality of the people in the Csound community. I think these are all rather high. Indeed, that is one motive for my real concern. If this thing is as great as I think it is, then why don’t more people use it?
In his keynote, Steven Yi mentioned some things other musicians say when they learn he uses Csound:
You use Csound?
People still use that?
It’s so old...
Is that the sound of Csound?
I’m a musician, not a programmer.
I will offer my thoughts about these things, which I also have heard, but first I think there needs to be some context regarding electroacoustic music in particular, and art music in general, in our world.
Art music is music that either is designed just for listening, or that is meaningful when used for just listening. My impression is that our civilization continues to educate people pretty well for the purpose of producing art music (and indeed electroacoustic music). But our civilization does not use this music in the same ways that it used to. The most obvious sign is that, on the one hand, the concert halls are full of grey heads while, on the other hand, the streets and offices are full of people wearing earbuds that place them into their own private bubble of music. It is not even easy to find out, without disturbing the listener by pulling him or her out of that bubble, what they are listening to.
Regarding electroacoustic music, its audience is, as with poetry, mostly the artists themselves. This is a larger and often vibrant bubble, but it is still a bubble. In other words, the world of high art is fragmented and esoteric, and there is no canon that society as a whole pays any real attention to.
I am by no means rendering a purely negative judgment here. There is actually tremendous freedom in this situation. It is easy to get an education, or to teach oneself as I have done, to find a way into one of these bubbles, and lead a productive and rewarding life in it. Above all, what used to be very expensive tools reserved for an elite are now widely available and often even free. This is a great freedom. But it is isolated. And this isolation is undoubtedly a factor in the alienation that passivates us and that will, if unchecked, lead to tyranny.
Now perhaps my responses to Steven’s observations may make more sense. The people asking these questions live in a different bubble than we do, both artistically, and technologically. Their remarks are naive and reflect presuppositions.
You use Csound? This identifies the questioner as being from a different bubble. Nobody they know uses Csound, but other tools with their own mystique, perhaps one formed by advertising.
People still use that? Ditto. The questioner knows what Csound was, but not what it is. There is an awareness that Csound was invented in the age when expensive computers were reserved for an elite, which generates an implicit assumption that this is now overcome by tools that are easier to use and more fun.
It’s so old... Ditto ditto. Again, this reflects the culture of the moment, where only the new is the good, and it implies an eagerness for tools that confer an instant gratification (nothing wrong with that, by the way, as long as it doesn’t preclude other approaches). There is no awareness that if Csound is 30 years old, that means scientists, programmers, and musicians have been adding onto and refining Csound for two or even three generations of artistic and scientific work. Somehow old is good for a city, but not for a software system. The reality is that the basic Music N design by Max Mathews and the translation to elegant C code by Barry Vercoe require, in the fundamentals, no revision, and they provide solid support for extension. The situation is similar with respect to some other software systems such as database servers and languages, symbolic algebra programs such as Mathematica, or the LaTeX computer typesetting system, all born in the same era as Csound and also still going strong. In short, other things being equal, older is actually better; well-designed software systems just keep getting more and more powerful, and Csound has a head start.
Is that the sound of Csound? The questioner assumes that older software will sound inferior to newer software. This of course is simply not (usually) true. A digital oscillator is a digital oscillator; a digital filter is a digital filter. Furthermore the continuous refinement and extension of Csound have brought into it many techniques from research and from other computer music systems. Studio software is made from the same parts, so of course Csound will normally sound as good as the best studio software. But there is more to this. There is another assumption, namely that the user is passive and not able to improve the sounds that come out of the box. The fact is, that with experience, the user is significantly able to improve the sounds that come out of the box, and to invent completely new sounds. But this takes work and thought... more on work and thought below. At any rate, given a little work and thought, Csound will sound better than the best studio software (with some notable exceptions that I will not go into here and that we should address in another place). Some of the pieces in the conference were proof enough of that!
I’m a musician, not a programmer. Actually, I believe this question can be better understood by rewording it. I’m a musician, not a researcher or an inventor. I’m a musician, not a thinker.
To go back to the question of art music, you can’t make art music without thinking. But thinking is painful. So why make art music? This is the real question, the final question. Because I like it. Why make computer music? Because I like it.
Helping more people like art music is a question for another forum. But I do think we can help people who already like art music, or who already like computer music, find out if they like the kind of music that can be made with Csound, and that is what this about.
So, in my view, one productive response to the questions asked of Steven Yi is to make music made with Csound more impressive, more available to musicians, to make it easier for them to see if they like it. The music needs to come out of our bubble and perhaps find a way into other bubbles. How to do this may have many answers, but I propose that part of the answer can be an online system similar to SoundCloud or ShaderToy where Csound users can easily post complete works that will end up being sorted by popularity and other criteria so that the best, or at least the most popular, works will be easily accessible to non-Csound musicians. or even, mirabile dictu, regular people. This can be done using the WebAssembly build of Csound so that what one hears can be rendered live by Csound running in the listener’s browser.
For the sake of those who, like myself, actually wish to make money from music created with Csound, this portal could also perhaps be designed to post soundfiles and/or videos to YouTube, if the musician posting the piece has the required registrations with Google, AdSense, and so on. (I know that CDBaby automatically posts videos of pieces from CDBaby CDs to YouTube; when I went to post some of my pieces to YouTube, I found that CDBaby had already put them there.)
If our music comes out of our bubble, even a little, the software system, Csound, will follow it. And if that happens, new developers will join us.