Music for All with Open Source Software

Katherine Druckman — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 21:42:43 +0000

I am embarrassed to admit that I have never in my life considered the struggle of blind musicians to find Braille music scores. I did not realize until last week that only about 1% of sheet music is available in an accessible format, but my friend Robert Douglass is hoping to change that with his Open Well-Tempered Clavier - Ba©h to Bach project on Kickstarter.com.

To get a better idea of what the lack of Braille music scores means to an actual musician, see Eunah Choi's video below.

The Open Well-Tempered Clavier Kickstarter project began with the goal of creating a public domain score and recording of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, with the intention of making Bach's work, a cultural treasure, accessible to all without the burden of copyright. Along the way, Robert and the others behind this project discovered that full accessibility is a much greater challenge. While a public domain score and recording tears down a few walls, other walls remain for those can't see the score. To that end, the project's goal has now been extended to include a Braille version of the Bach score, and with enough funding, a means to convert tens of thousands of scores into Braille thanks to open source software.

The underlying issue is about creating a process whereby existing open source music tools can be made to work together properly, and then be used to generate Braille scores, as no open source tools yet exist for creating Braille music. The specific technical challenge will be to complete work on an open source Braille converter for the MusicXML format, which would then allow the 50,000 scores on MuseScore.com, and any future additions, to be downloaded as a Braille file that is then readable with a Braille terminal. MuseScore.com is a web service that facilitates creating, sharing, and storing sheet music using MuseScore's open source music notation software. As an interesting sidenote, MuseScore's popularity is on the rise compared to its proprietary equivalents (see the illustration of Google trends below), so score another point for team open source and for music educators as well.

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Super Collision At Studio Dave: The New World of SuperCollider3, Part 1

Dave Phillips — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Dave Phillips

SuperCollider3

SuperCollider is composer/programmer James McCartney's gift to the world of open-source audio synthesis/composition environments. In its current manifestation, SuperCollider3 includes capabilities for a wide variety of sound synthesis and signal processing methods, cross-platform integrated GUI components for designing interfaces for interactive performance, support for remote control by various external devices, and a rich set of tools for algorithmic music and sound composition. And yes, there's more, much more.

This 3-part article combines a preview of SuperCollider 3.5 and a review of The SuperCollider Book, the latest audio-related tome from the press at MIT. I'll introduce the system and some of its components, with example code and screenshots (I love screenshots), then I'll be your tour guide to some interesting SuperCollider projects and Web sites. I'll conclude with a summary of my impressions of SuperCollider, followed by my review of The SuperCollider Book.

Background Bits

In 1996, SuperCollider was released as a closed-source commercial program available only for the Macintosh computer. In 2002 the source code was released to the public under the GPL. Since then development has been consistent and impressive, and the system is now available for Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows, with a high level of cross-platform compatibility.

SuperCollider has been designed as a client/server arrangement, with a clean division between its audio processing parts (scsynth) and the language used to control those parts (sclang). In a typical application the synthesizer is started in a separate process, then the user writes code in a text editor (e.g. Emacs, Gedit, vi/vim) configured for operation with SuperCollider. The editor configuration usually includes mechanisms for controlling the server state and for sending code to the synthesizer for rendering, often as a realtime process.

A complete list of SuperCollider's capabilities would be beyond the scope of this article. Synthesis primitives are well-represented by a variety of oscillators, filters, effects, and control mechanisms (envelopes, gates, triggers). SuperCollider has borrowed the unit generator concept - i.e. an audio processing "black box" - from the MusicN languages. Users combine unit generators to roll their own synthesis and processing graphs into what SuperCollider calls a SynthDef. Many predefined SynthDefs are available, and it's easy to create your own.

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Music Software

Music for All with Open Source Software

Super Collision At Studio Dave: The New World of SuperCollider3, Part 1