Hi, all!
Welcome to Composing Music with SuperCollider, a course that provides its students with a foundation in sound design, algorithmic composition, and basic visualization techniques, using the SuperCollider programming language as a creative platform. The first four weeks of this class is dedicated to familiarizing students with SuperCollider, in addition to covering basic sound design and digital signal processing.
We began our first class by listening to Fractus III, a piece by Eli Fieldsteel for flute and electronics that shows off a great deal of what SuperCollider can bring to a piece. We then covered what a multimedia programming language is, discussed the pros and cons of text-based and visual programming languages, the client-server architecture of SuperCollider, and a brief overview of OSC. We wrapped up the first hour by going over additive and subtractive synthesis, just-in-time compilation, SuperCollider syntax, and the difference between audio and control rates.
The second hour included a demonstration of and practical hands-on work with basic SuperCollider code. I’ve set up a GitHub repository containing some of the code examples I showed in class that can be found here.
Before next week’s class, I urge all of you to watch the following two tutorial videos. They are from Eli Fieldsteel’s SuperCollider tutorial series, and do a fantastic job in laying down a foundation for programming in the language. Seeing as the culmination of our twelve-week program is the creation of a portfolio-ready piece of electroacoustic composition, we simply won’t have the time to go over a number of these details in depth during class, so some supplementary reading or video watching will be requested of you as the weeks progress. I would also like for all of you to experiment more with SinOsc and try out the Saw and LFTri UGens, using the code examples I posted on the GitHub repository as models.
Thank you, and I look forward to seeing all of you next week!