csound-ac

Michael Gogins
https://github.com/gogins
http://michaelgogins.tumblr.com

Introduction

This repository contains:

1. CsoundAC, an algorithmic composition library, designed to be used with Csound. CsoundAC is written in C++, and has both C++ and Python interfaces. CsoundAC implements music models, which are kind of like scene graphs for pieces. CsoundAC has sophisticated facilities for working with tonal and non-tonal chords, progressions, and scales, and for implementing classical-style voice-leading in generated scores.

2. My computer music playpen, designed to facilitate algorithmic composition with Csound and CsoundAC by extending standard text editors. The playpen makes it possible to run various kinds of Csound pieces, and even to build C++ pieces and plugin opcodes, from the editor. For more information, see playpen/README.md.

3. My Visual Studio Code extension that implements the computer music playpen. Consider working in this environment. For more information, see vscode-playpen/README.md

4. silencio, a JavaScript library for algorithmic composition similar to CsoundAC. However, using the WebAssembly build of CsoundAC in csound-wasm is now recommended in place of silencio.

5. patches, a library of Csound instrument definitions, developed over many years and used in many of my pieces.

6. ac_reaper, a utility that supports doing algorithmic composition within the Reaper digital audio workstation, using Python ReaScripts.

Currently, CsoundAC is supported on macOS and Linux.

Please log any bug reports or requests for enhancements at https://github.com/gogins/csound-ac/issues.

Changes

See https://github.com/gogins/csound-ac/commits/develop for the commit log.

Using

CsoundAC can be used both as a C++ library, as a Python extension module, and as a WebAssembly kodue. Python is easier to use, but C++ offers considerably more power and speed. The WebAssembly build of CsoundAC in csound-wasm has the same power as the C++ library and somewhat less speed.

Examples (some of which can also serve as tests) for the various aspects of csound-ac are maintained in my separate csound-examples repository. Some of the examples there will run in WebBrowsers using WebAssembly, and these can be viewed at https://gogins.github.io/csound-examples.

Installation

1. You must first install the following pre-requisites on your system:

   1.1 Libsndfile for reading and writing most any format of soundfile.

   1.2 Csound for sound synthesis.

   1.3 The Eigen header-file-only library for linear algebra.

   1.4 The Boost C++ Libraries. Only the header files are used.

   1.5 The OpenCV library for image processing.

   1.6 The Python programming language, version 3.12 or higher.

2. There are prebuilt binary releases for this package available at https://github.com/gogins/csound-ac/releases. These can be downloaded, unzipped to /usr/local (or even ~/usr/local), and used from there. The binary files are archives, not installers. They should be installed in the same way on all platforms:

   1. Download the archive from the releases page.

   2. Use the 7z program to unzip the archive to the output directory, e.g. 7z x -o/usr/local csound-ac-0.5.0-Darwin.zip. 7z will ask you what to do about any files that it might overwrite.

   3. Run sudo ldconfig or take equivalent steps to ensure that the libraries can be found by the operating system. You may need to add appropriate directories to your compiler's header files path, and to the operating system PATH environment variable.

   4. To uninstall, you can list the contents of the archive to a file, e.g. unzip unzip csound-ac-0.5.0-Darwin.zip -l > listing.txt. You can use this to identify files to remove, and you could even write a script to parse listing.txt and remove all files listed therein.

   Please note, on macOS the CsoundAC libraries are installed by default to /usr/local/lib. They can be installed elsewhere, but if so, you will probably need to set up install names and rpaths using otool.

Helpers

There are files and directories in the Git repository and in the packages that can be used as helpers for csound-ac. You can create symbolic links from these files to your home directory or other places.

• build-env.sh: Source this to set useful environment variables for the build and runtime environment on Linux. You may need to copy and modify this script.

• Creata a symbolic link from csound-ac/playpen/playpen.py to your home directory, to enable use of the computer music plapen.

• Copy csound-ac/playpen/playpen.ini to your home directory and customize it for your environment, to configure the computer music playen.

• If you use Visual Studio Code, install in it the playpen.vsix extension, which makes the computer music playpen part of Visual Studio Code.

• If you use the SciTE text editor, Create a symbolic link from csound-ac/playpen/.SciTEUser.properties to your home directory, which makes the computer music playpen part of SciTE.

• silencio: Create a symbolic link to this directory in every directory in which you are writing or running a piece that uses the Silencio library.

• patches: Include the full path of this directory in your Csound environment variable INCDIR.

Building On Your Local Computer

The following instructions are for macOS. Linux is similar. For more information, look at ./github/cmake.yaml. However, on Linux it may be better to build Csound for source code.

1. Clone this Git repository.

2. Install prerequisites as follows from the repository root directory:

    brew update
    brew upgrade
    brew install graphviz
    brew install doxygen
    brew install opencv
    brew install csound
    brew install bwfmetaedit
    brew install sox
    brew install ffmpeg
    brew install lame
    brew install sndfile
    brew install imagemagick
    git clone "https://gitlab.com/libeigen/eigen.git"

3. Execute bash update-dependencies.sh.

4. Build like this:

    mkdir -p build-macos
    cd build-macos
    rm -f CMakeCache.txt
    cmake -Wno-dev .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr/local:/usr 
    make -j6 VERBOSE=1
    sudo make install

Release Notes

v7.0

• There is a new version of the Computer Music Playpen, in the form of a Visual Studio Code extension. This is now the recommnded environment for using CsoundAC.

• CsoundAC no longer implements the Soundfile class.

• CsoundAC no longer maintains the Lua binding.

• CsoundAC has internalized support for the CppSound class, because the brew package for Csound on macOS includes the the libcsnd6 dylib without the corresponding header files. This may create a breaking change in the API for some users, but makes it possible to keep maintaining the continuous integration builds and releases of CsoundAC on GitHub.