Tribute to electronic music women pioneers

The new Sound on Sound magazine has a long article about the legenday BBC Radiophonics Workshop. Of course one of the central characters in that golden era of early electronic music was Delia Derbyshire. There’s even a website devoted to her works and history: http://www.delia-derbyshire.org
Also at the Radiophonics Workshop was Daphne Oram. Yes, there’s a [...]

My history Part 6: from MIDI to Audio (1999 – 2008)

Before around 2000, the average home computer did not really have the juice to conveniently manipulate audio data the way you would say, graphics or words using paint and word processing programs. Because of that, the way most PC/Mac composers had to work was to use the MIDI command language to drive hardware synthesizers through [...]

athenaCL and blue

Nobody can ever claim there aren’t enough options out there to try.
I had run across this one before, and still haven’t had time to research it any more closely. From its website, it’s described this way:

“athenaCL is a modular, polyphonic, poly-paradigm algorithmic music composition in a cross-platform interactive command-line environment.”

It’s another open-source project (i.e., free [...]

Back to talking Csound again: comments on recent discussions on the messageboard

The Csound discussion boards at nabble.com have been busy lately with the developer folks attempting to create a version 5.08 release. I’m only looking in on that process as an outsider with a tiny view through a crack in the door, but it appears that there is quite a bit of hair pulling that goes [...]

“Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra” by John Szwed

(If you’ve read this entry before March 17th, note that I finished the book the day before and have extensively edited this entry.)
Before I talk about this book itself, I have to complain about something. I bought it at a thrift store in San Diego for about 65 cents. It was discarded from the Chula [...]