CMP NEWS

Editorial

In addition to the obvious room layout changes, many other changes have been occuring this semester, in particular:

1. Monthly meetings of the CMP users to share their work and give feedback regarding CMP policies.
2. The reorganization of the documentation structure including the production of a new comprehensive user's manual.
3. Reorganization of software and utilities.
4. The addition of many new sound utilities and instrument designs developed here in CMP.
5. The creation of a newsgroup, uiuc.org.music.cmp to aid in getting quick answers for software debugging and other questions about procedures in CMP.
6. The formation of a CMP advisory committee, albeit an interim body, to meet with the faculty co-directors of CMP.

I would like to touch briefly upon some of these changes, to articulate how I hope that some of these changes might be most effectively utilized.

• The meetings have been very successful. We met in February, March, and April and were able to dicuss the mechanics of the CMP advisory committee election process, listen to Arun Chandra detailing how to use many of the sound utilities he has written, discuss strategies for amplitude balance problems caused by simultaneous instruments (how to get the most dynamic range without clipping), talk about some joint software GUI-front-end software team projects (hopefully to begin this summer), and also listen to a work in progress. Future meetings might focus on using Interface Builder, using freeware (i.e. RT, GrASp), writing man pages for your sound utilities, and cross-platform sound processing (i.e. with SoundHack on the Macintosh).
• I produced the first edition of the user's manual in January and will release, this summer, a new version detailing many of the changes that have occurred this semester. Two copies of the manual for CSound are now located in the documentation cabinet (as well as on-line in the snd application). The CMix documentation exists as a file, if there is sufficient interest, we can print it out and bind it. Copies of the NeXT Sound Reference manual and reference have also been made available as well as a library of most of the seminal articles from Computer Music Journal and the Proceedings of the Computer Music Association. Documentation of all sound utilties and sound software will be made available whenever possible.
• Most software has been put in /LocalApps and sound utilities have been put in /usr/local/bin or /usr/CMP/sndan/bin with source code located in /usr/local/src.
• Several new instruments appeared in M4CDIR/instru/
  • m4c.as Additive Syntheis Instrument
  • m4c.smp Sampling Instrument
  • m4c.smp2 Sampling Instrument w/ reverb
  • m4c.tpt Trumpet synthesis instrument
  Some of the new utilities include:
  • tplot Plots sound signal vs. time
  • sftune Gets Hz. of sound file by tuning it against sine tone
  • sfpc Continous playback of soundfile.
  • reverb Has 5 different reverb algorithms it can apply to a file.
  • filter Filters a sound
  • pitches Plays a tone
  In addition, Arun Chandra provided many routines that can be called from within a C program including: sfplay, sfread, sfinfo, sfamplify, sfpeak, sframp, sfclickout, sfquelch,and more...

  Descriptions of all these should be available as man pages and/or printed documentation in CMP.

• Although not yet in widespread use, the newsgroup uiuc.org.music.cmp exists as a forum for answers to software and other questions. It can be accessed with the nn program on uxa, ux1, and uxc4 and other UNIX workstations and campus mainframes, as well as by using NewsGrazer (in /LocalApps) on the NeXTs, or Nuntius from the Macintoshes in CAMIL (Note: if it does not appear in Nuntius, throw away the list of all groups in the Nuntius Preferences folder and restart Nuntius).
• CMP Advisory Committee (Brett Terry, James Bohn, Ray Watts, and David Berk served as the four representatives of the CMP Advisory Committee. James Bohn and David Berk stepped down and an election was announced for the two representative positions for this spring but, because noone else was nominated, they continued to serve out the Spring term. A new election will occur in the Fall.
• Lastly, we are hoping to have a CMP concert in July, so try to get something ready by early July. More on that later.

User reports

Jim Bohn is currently finishing "Germalectic" for computer generated tape.In his next project, for solo cello, every other section of the piece will be composed with the aid of the computer.

Arun Chandra has been working on four main projects this semester. He has been finalizing a library of sound procesing routines, composing a 13-minute piece for piano and tape, a 12-minute piece for trombone and tape, and editing a book of 25 articles by Herbert Brun for publication.

Brett Terry has been working on a GUI front end for an event list graphical score-based aprroach to score files for m4C and CSound. He presented a paper on the uses of Chaos Theory in Electro-Acoustic Music as the 1994 SEAMUS Conference in Middlebury, Vermont this April.

Lydia Ayers' work "Bioluminescense" was heard at the 1994 SEAMUS conference.

Andy Walters has been working on a piece called "Pearls" for tape using m4C and the sounds of processed Chinese instruments.

Ray Watts has been working with background layers created by a simple algorithm in cmix and foreground layers created by a shuffling algorithm using his scogen=A0program and M4C.

former CMP user Rob Maher (PhD in ECE, 1989), now at U. of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Prof. Jim Beauchamp have a paper in the most recent issue (April, '94) of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America entitled: Fundamental frequency estimation of musical signals using a two-way mismatch procedure Prof. Beauchamp recently attended the 1994 SEAMUS conference at Middlebury, VT and gave a paper with former CMP user Andrew Horner (PhD in CS, 1993) entitled Spectral Modeling and Timbre Hybridization Programs for ComputerMusic.

Several former UIUC computer music students were at the recent SEAMUS conference and gave papers and/or had pieces performed. These included Brian Belet (DMA, 1990), Mara Helmuth (MA, 1988?), and Charles Mason (DMA,1982?). They are teaching at Clark University, MA, Texas A&M University, and Univeristy of Alabama, Birmingham, respectively.

May 10-18 Prof. Beauchamp is taking advantage of a special U. of I. Foundation grant to travel to Hong Kong to visit Andrew Horner, who is currently on the faculty of the Computer Science Dept. at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and also former CMP composer John (Kwok-Ping) Chen (DMA, 1987), professor of music at Hong Kong Baptist University. Chen's "HUANG ZHONG ELEMENTS" for 4-channel tape and modern dance was recently selected by the 1994 ICMC for performance at Aarhus, Denmark. Profs. Beauchamp and Chen will be working on computer music and sound analysis software during the visit. In early June Beauchamp and Horner are giving a paper on a special session "Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception of Musical Instrument Sounds" at thespring meeting of the Acoustical Society of America at M.I.T., Cambridge, MA. The paper is entitled: Derivation of a synthesis model from time-variant spectral analysis.

In early July Prof. Beauchamp is leaving for Paris, France where he will be working at IRCAM (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics and Music) for about 11 months. He will be working primarily with Stephen McAdams(psychoacoustics), Xavier Rodet (analysis/synthesis), and Rene Causse (musical acoustics).

The Music 4C (music synthesis) and sndan (soundanalysis/synthesis/modifiction) packages have been available for ftp for over 1 year. These a C-based packages which run on most any Unix workstation. The graphics used in sndan require either Tek 4014 emulation or an .eps display program. (On the NeXT .eps display is handled using the Preview application, on the SGI, xpsview is used). Currently there are about 35 users of both packages, both in the US and abroad.