I'm with Oeyvind on this one. I can see why those who know how Csound works from the inside out find it misleading, but like Oeyvind I too find it easy to explain to my students in terms of many times a second the update, i.e. the rate at which they update. Had I explain signal vectors to my second year undergrad students I think many of them would give up on computer music altogether! Rory. 2009/1/14 Steven Yi : > I see Fons' point, but at the same time, I do find the term rate > misleading, probably because I do program quite a bit. The issue I > have with rate is exactly Andres' point of there really being only one > rate in Csound. I can see how rate may be useful when a user first > starts using Csound, but after that I think it hinders more than it > helps to getting a better understanding of coding Csound instruments. > (There is also the term "-sig", as in k-sig, a-sig, w-sig, f-sig, etc. > that is used in Csound. This clashes sometimes conceptually with > "rate" and "type" as well...) > > My preference would be to have a manual page that discuss variables as > a concept, discussing types of variables and their usages. We could > discuss a kvar or avar as a "variable of type a" or "variable of type > k" and that their usages in musical terms would be "an audio signal" > and a "control signal". Perhaps a table of "type", "musical use", > "technical detail" would be good here, then using either "kvar" or > "k-type" as a standard for documentation. > > As a side note, one thing I reallly appreciated about Music4C when I > looked at that a long while back was the clear separation of init-time > and performance-time as two separate functions. One ends up doing > this naturally in Csound by doing initialization code at the top of an > instrument and performance code at the bottom. Csound own opcodes > internally have this split into their init functions and performance > functions too. (Ultimately, I think it's an object system with init > function as constructor, but that's probably too geeky! :P ) But > looking at Music4C illuminated a bit some ideas about synthesis > systems that made sense to me. > > steven > > On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 4:10 PM, Fons Adriaensen wrote: >> On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 06:52:10PM -0500, Andres Cabrera wrote: >> >>> Rate is misleading as there is actually only a single rate in Csound: >>> control rate. i-rate is not actually a rate, since it is not periodic, >>> but occurs only on instrument initialization, and a-rate is not a rate >>> either, but indicates a vector processed at k-rate. >> >> That's an implementation detail, and irrelevant to a user. >> Conceptually, samples are generated at a-rate. The whole >> system behave 'as if'. >> >> IMHO the term 'rate' comes closest to what is relevant to a >> musical user. 'Type' is software engineering language, and >> I'd guess most Csound users are not software engineers, nor >> should they be expected to be. >> >> Ciao, >> >> -- >> FA >> >> Laboratorio di Acustica ed Elettroacustica >> Parma, Italia >> >> O tu, che porte, correndo si ? >> E guerra e morte ! >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> This SF.net email is sponsored by: >> SourcForge Community >> SourceForge wants to tell your story. >> http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword >> _______________________________________________ >> Csound-devel mailing list >> Csound-devel@lists.sourceforge.net >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/csound-devel >> > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > This SF.net email is sponsored by: > SourcForge Community > SourceForge wants to tell your story. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword > _______________________________________________ > Csound-devel mailing list > Csound-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/csound-devel > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Csound-devel mailing list Csound-devel@lists.sourceforge.net