Re: [sc-users] How did you learn SC? (was: Textures, drones)

[Jonatan Liljedahl <lijon@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

And here's my long and boring story:

I've been interested in music and technology since I was a kid. Started 
trying to code BASIC on my C64 at the age of 8, then moved over to 
pascal on a 8086 machine running at blasting 10MHz :), then I found C 
and that's what I still mostly use for "real" software development, 
along with Objective-C, some JavaScript, Python and plain old shellscripts.

Before I had my C64, I had already started to get interested in sound 
synthesis, using my moms DX7. I was amazed that I could make my own 
sounds that was never heard before! But I could never find exactly the 
kind of sounds I was looking for, and after some years I came across 
analog synthesizers and the sound hit me right in the heart. Since I was 
also interested in electronics, I decided to build my own and I started 
to make homegrown analogue synths (and dreadlocks). At this time I was 
rather fundamentalist about the analogue "magic" and hated everything 
digital when it came to sound and music. But soon I wanted to have more 
precise structural control, and built a CV/Gate interface connected to 
the parport of an old 486, running custom software. So now it was a 
hybrid system, computer controlled analogue synthesis: 
http://kymatica.com/uploads/Hardware/gear.jpg

Then I did a 2-year education in composition in Visby, where Jesper Elén 
(reading this list I think) had a course in SC. I was quite impressed by 
the flexibility of both language and synth, but felt that it was too 
much distance between my ideas and trying to understand how to implement 
it in SC, and I thought SC was a bit messy.. (which it is ;) Also, I 
still was in love with my analogue gear and was not interested in doing 
DSP. I also tried out Pd, ChucK and Max/MSP (the latter a standard in 
swedish contemporary music composition involving live electronics).

The big change came somewhat slowly while doing a bachelor in 
electroacoustic composition at the royal collage of music, Stockholm. 
There I met CSound in a one-week course, and realized that using 
computers for synthesis could be _really_ powerful and flexible compared 
to having to build or buy all the analogue synthesizer modules I 
wanted... ;) Also I integrated csound with my first version of 
AlgoScore. But after using csound for a while I started to be annoyed by 
it's limitations. At this time I had somewhat forgot about SC and didn't 
thought about taking a look at it again.

But then, one day, I was getting some gear at Fylkingen (an organization 
and venue for experimental art and music), and it happened to be at the 
same moment as Fredrik Olofsson was having a SC-workshop there. So I 
sneaked in just to have a look and a chat with my friends taking the 
workshop. And a light of pure understanding came upon me, and I realized 
that SC was everything I had missed in csound, that all the power and 
flexibility and openness was there! I went straight home, installed SC 
and since that night I've been using SC for everything, especially sound 
synthesis. I still have my homegrown analogue modular but it's seldom 
used, even though I replaced the CV/Gate interface with an Arduino that 
speaks USB.

PS. btw, my mom still has her DX7..

/Jonatan

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