Month: October 2013

I recently gave a talk at the 2nd International Csound Conference, held at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, entitled “How Csound Works”.  In the talk, I went through high-level design, key data structures, the Orchestra compiler, the event and runtime system, and some other features.  I have placed a copy of the presentation slides as a zip file here:

Download Slides

Additionally, the slides can be viewed online here.

Regarding the slides, I used Hakim El Hattab’s wonderful Javascript Slide framework, Reveal.js.

Note: I believe the presentation was recorded.  When that is made available, I will update this entry with a link to the video.

The 2nd International Csound Conference took place this past weekend at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.  I had a fantastic time there getting to see Jean-Claude Risset, John Chowning, and Barry Vercoe all give keynotes.  There was a reallly nice tribute session for Max Matthews, with people like Tom Oberheim, David Ziccarelli, and Max’s family there sharing some beautiful stories about Max.

Beyond that, it was great to see all the latest going on in the Csound community. I thoroughly enjoyed Rory Walsh’s presentation on Cabbage, as well as Andres Cabrera’s presentation on CsoundQt. They’ve both made some great developments in their software!  I also really enjoyed Oeyvind Brandtsegg’s presentation “Sonification with Csound ­ Quasar Correlations”, discussing an upcoming installation work.

There were certainly many presentations given on the 2nd day, and as they were in parallel tracks one simply couldn’t attend everything.  I ended up giving one presentation on the first day, and two presentations on the second, one of which spanned two parts.  Because of that I certainly felt like I missed out on going to presentations, but I believe everything was being filmed so I am looking forward to watching those when they are out.

Regarding the presentations I gave, I think I did just a so-so job on the Blue presentation, and was happy with how the “How Csound Works” and “How to use the Csound API” talks went. Given that there was a lot to prepare, I was happy in the end with how it all turned out.

The concerts were a very nice variety of pieces in different aesthetics. I was happy to be listening to music on very nice speakers, and especially enjoyed being in the company of many friends to do so.  I also enjoyed meeting a number of new people, and also finally putting faces to names I had long known from the mailing list.

Overall, I had a great time in Boston. I think Dr. Boulanger and the Berklee College of Music did a wonder job in organizing and creating a very special and memorable event. I’m already looking forward to the next Csound Conference!