Starting SuperCollider

Over the next few posts, I will be documenting the process of creating a software synthesis system which interfaces with hardware MIDI devices. The goal of this project is to bring together the powerful expressiveness of software synthesis with the intuition of hardware interaction.

This first post describes some of the software used in the project.

Motivation

I have a MIDI controller that I would like to bring into the mix more (so to speak) in my music workflow. The great thing about hardware designed to work with software on a computer is that it offers a lot of flexibility; however, that comes with the price of requiring a bit of effort and creativity on the software end to take full advantage of the hardware.

When it comes to digital sound synthesis, there is perhaps no program more powerful than SuperCollider. SuperCollider runs as a server which can be sent commands from clients. The server is usually are controlled using the `sclang` programming language. The program and language are designed specifically for electroacoustics and generative music. See the video below for an example of a project that used SuperCollider for both of these functions.

The laptop as an instrument is a rather new concept, but the techniques used in digital synthesis and generative music are decades old. With this project, I aim to tap into and expand upon that legacy.

Development Tools

SuperCollider has its own IDE called scide, but I will be working in the Emacs development environment. Emacs is a general purpose text editor which I use for most of my work that involves plain text. Emacs is well suited for SuperCollider development because Emacs itself runs with a REPL (Read–eval–print loop). This encourages a workflow of writing small chucks of code, sending them to the server to be evaluated, and then analyzing the results.

SuperCollider works by interfacing with the JACK Audio Connection Kit. Like SuperCollider itself, JACK works as a server that directs signals from many different sources. It is designed for real-time audio applications and thus tends to have very low latency. I use a suite of tools called Cadence to control and connect my JACK applications. The figure above shows how I have wired together the SuperCollider server with my system capture (microphone) and system playback (speakers or headphones). Using JACK allows SuperCollider to interact with other audio programs such as a DAW (digital audio workstation).

Making Some Sounds

Now that I have all the tools needed to run SuperCollider set up, let’s start making some noise. I first needed to boot up Emacs running the SuperCollider environment.

emacs -sclang

I then booted the SuperCollider server.

s = Server.local.boot;

s is a special variable that is used exclusively for the Server. The other letters of the alphabet can be used as global variables. It is best to attach functions or any other sound generator to a variable so that they can be stopped or modified when needed. To start, I used a function that combined a sine oscillator with pink noise. The arguments for the sine oscillator indicate frequency, phase, and amplitude. The argument for the PinkNoise generator indicates volume.

g = { SinOsc.ar(440, 0, 0.1) + PinkNoise.ar(0.01) }.play;

This sound will play indefinitely until we free the function.

g.free;

Running and then freeing the function produces the following output:

We now have sound being generated by SuperCollider. In the next post, I will be setting up MIDI input.