Csound

Csound is the music and audio signal processing language developed by MIT's Barry Vercoe. Csound will provide audio services for the OLPC computer.

Csound is both a programming language and a sound synthesis engine. It will be included on the OLPC to be used by applications or directly by the children.

Further information about Csound is on their website: http://csounds.com/ or see their instructions for playing Csound in Pippy [1].

Tutorials

See Csound tutorials for a wiki introduction to using Csound for music development.

Midi playback

Csound can play back midi files; this functionality primarily exists in the shipping builds, but is not turned on.

Csound activities

Tam Tam uses Csound but you would never know it as they hide the Csound Program from the User and wrap it into child-friendly activities and games that allow kids to make sounds, make music, jam, record and transform their voices. TamTam Edit allows students to patch together Csound's opcodes (modules) and teaches them all about signals, synthesis, and synthesizers.

 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Tamtam

You can see a number of activities developed by Greg for 542, mostly uploaded here:

 http://csounds.com/GregCsoundActivities.zip

Pippy uses Csound to help teach children the Python programming language and to build XO Activities.

 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pippy

csndsugui

You can also use csndsugui, a Python toolkit for the development of Csound-based audio and music activities. The code, plus examples and documentation, can be found in:

 http://dev.laptop.org/git/activities/csndsugui

Sample Code

• A simple Python project using Csound to create an audible system load monitor using the standard Python Csound binding
• TamTam uses a custom C++ wrapper around Csound and has a very large sound library available