### -My reply follows quotes- At 3:04 -0700 5/29/98, you wrote:
>Dear all,
>
>I am new to this mailing list.  I just took part in it today!  So if the
>question here has been asked by someone else before, please forgive me.
>
>What I would like to know is why we choose Csound.  As far as I know,
>Csound is a synthesis language.  It can really make a lot of sounds that
>do not exist in the world.  But don't you think synthesisers and samplers
>are great enough to realize it?  So why Csound?  Could someone out there
>give me some advice so that I will be clear about it?


Hello.  Composer here (Please wait: swapping hats...)

I can think of a few reasons.  Some of these I have adopted from Richard
Boulanger but although they are not my original thoughts I still subscribe
to the reasoning.  (Sorry, it's not that easy to scrub academia out of
me...)

1) FREE
--- There are lots of great synthesizers, samplers and signal processors
--- for sure but they all consume some of that rare commodity: money.  Csound
--- on the other hand is free and there is no extra charge for adding
--- unit generators to your orchestras or voices to your score!  Yes, there
--- is always a trade-off in compilation time and for those working on fast
--- deadlines that could be a problem...unless they get a faster machine.
--- But for most of us who can't afford all of the gear we'd like, the cost
--- of Csound is mighty fine.

2) TECHNICALLY FLEXIBLE
--- As you may already know, Csound is available for a wide variety of
--- platforms and machines.  There are also many associated tools developed
--- by various members of the Csound community which extend Csound's
--- functions or user-interface (or both).  Csound's broad hardware support
--- has also resulted in a large community of users (see below).  In my
--- humble experience it's also one of the easier free software synthesis
--- languages to learn.  Also, Csound is more flexible than the pre-wired
--- routings in hardware synthesizers, but of course more difficult to use.

3) MUSICALLY FLEXIBLE
--- There are many kinds of music in which electronic sound-generators are
--- used.  Just to name a few: algorithmic, popular, abstract-academic,
--- note-based, sound-based... (This is a poor sampling/poor description.)
--- They all have different needs: patterns, chaos, lots of notes, a very
--- few "notes" but lots of rich evolving sound...  They all come out of
--- different traditions in and out of the electronic music world.  Csound
--- is amazingly flexible and can accommodate many types of music.  It also
--- has its biases but as you will see if you stay on this list, many
--- different styles of music are made by people using Csound

4) A DOCUMENT
--- This one is not of interest to everyone, but when I'm wearing my more
--- scholarly hat, I like to learn from other composers by looking at their
--- scores and drafts, etc.  As a fairly direct descendent of the "Music N"
--- line of software fathered by Max Mathews of Bell Labs we can use, for
--- instance, example instruments written by Risset in his "Sound Catalog"
--- of 1969 to learn about electronic music techniques in general and
--- Csound in particular.  It is difficult if not impossible to determine
--- the techniques of producing sound from a tape.  (One person gave me an
--- interesting example where clever mixing creates the illusion of an
--- almost impossibly complex filter--yet no filter was used.)  Having the
--- orchestra and score files allows us to study other compositions and
--- learn from them.

5) THE PEOPLE
--- Because of all of the above, there is an enormous (ehm, relatively
--- speaking) community of composers, sound designers, theorists, etc.
--- using Csound and through this list and other means we share our
--- knowledge with each other through the common language of Csound.  Thus
--- where electronic music (and especially computer music) started out being
--- based largely in instutions which had the money and the brain power to
--- teach and implement the stuff, now we have Csound which is free,
--- flexible and allows for the teaching and generation of electro-acoustic
--- music to continue outside of institutional settings and thus hopefully
--- allowing for more creative freedom.


Ehm...or I could say that I use Csound instead of hardware synths because
it just kicks butt!  Yeah, that's it...

~~Charles



/----Charles D. Starrett-----\   "I do not feel that
|     /  | ____ | |  ____    |    my research suffered unduly
|    /\--| |    |-|  |       |    from the fact that I enjoyed it."
|   /  \ | |____| |  |___    |
|        |      | | ___|___  |  --Daniel Miller,
\--starrett@fas.harvard.edu--/    Modernity--an Ethnographic Approach