The ICMC was a lot of fun. I was a bit more relaxed and talked to more people.

Not many pieces at the ICMC were made using Csound. Most of the pieces, even the 'tape music' pieces, were made with Max/MSP, which as you know is a commercial product.

There was not much algorithmic composition in evidence. Most of the pieces were either interactive, or composed by generating materials with Max/MSP (or Csound) and assembling the pieces in Pro Tools.

A notable exception was Guerino Mazzola's paper on his impressive mathematical algorithmic composition system, Rubato, which outputs MIDI.

The best piece to my taste was Natasha Barrett's "Deep Sea Creatures." I'm not sure how it was made, but it's pure 'tape music.' Another good piece was an interactive one by Eric Lyon, which involved chamber musicians playing, recording that into Max/MSP, morphing it so that Eric could play back computer-processed accompaniments and solos. 

Some of the other interactive pieces sounded pretty good to me, and the way they sounded indicates to my mind that perhaps the computer is becoming a more or less standard chamber music instrument, to be considered by contemporary composers along with the piano, violin, etc.  I.e., the computer and instruments sound better integrated to me than they used to.

Musically, the field has been using the same basic style now for at least as long as I have been attending the ICMC, i.e. since 1995. I would like to see more stylistic variation and innovation.

There was a lot of research about analysing MIDI streams and audio streams in order to transcribe scores, separate sounds into sources, and so on. This research continues to make slow progress, but is still far from the holy grail of accurately transcribing polyphonic music from soundfiles or even MIDI streams.

Technically, for me, the most impressive DSP-related paper was about TAPESTREA, by Misra, Cook, and Wang, a GUI program for separating sources in sounds and recombining them. I think this will greatly speed up this kind of composing.

The ICMC did give me many useful ideas for contributions that I may make to Csound:

1. Opcodes implementing Georg Essl's 'circle map' dynamical system oscillators, usable for both sound synthesis and sequence generation.
2. Using Roger Dannenberg's research on MIDI velocity mapping to get better MIDI velocity input behavior with the command line flags.
3. Providing a Csound back end for Guerino Mazzola's Rubato composing system, which is written in Java.
4. Providing a Csound back end for FAUST, which generates efficient C++ code for DSP algorithms specified in a text-based unit generator block diagram notation. This would enable FAUST to generate Csound opcodes from these text-based block diagrams.
5. Providing FOMUS output from my Silence algorithmic composition system (FOMUS creates legible music notation from algorithmically generated scores).

My paper on score generation using spaces that represent voice-leadings and chords went over pretty well, I think. At least, people clapped, there were reasonably intelligent questions, and nobody gave me a hard time.

Regards,
Mike

-----Original Message-----
>From: jpff 
>Sent: Nov 15, 2006 5:25 AM
>To: Michael Gogins 
>Subject: Re: [Cs-dev] Windows installers for Csound 5.04
>
>Thanks Michael
>
>Hope ICMC was fun.
>
>==John ffitch




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