Circuit Bending

Circuit bending is the practice of modifying existing electronics items, most often toys, to create other items, usually musical instruments. The practice is attracting an increasing number of hobbyists, probably at least in part due to the increasing number of electronic toys and gadgets available.

GW_Grain

I designed the 'Grain Button' & 'Grain Switch' with the circuit bender in mind.

It is used to generate glitch distorted sounds. (through Granular Synthesis) It even applies the circuit bend philosophy through a software interface. It basically 'F's' with your sound card (upon use) without damaging or permanently altering your system.

Hardware/Software Buffer

Hardware Buffer -B

Number of audio sample-frames held in the DAC hardware buffer. This is a threshold on which software audio I/O (above) will wait before returning. A small number reduces audio I/O delay; but the value is often hardware limited, and small values will risk data lates. The default is 1024.

Software Buffer -b

Number of audio sample-frames per sound i/o software buffer. Large is efficient, but small will reduce audio I/O delay. The default is 1024. In real-time performance, Csound waits on audio I/O on Numb boundaries. It also processes audio (and polls for other input like MIDI) on orchestra ksmps boundaries. The two can be made synchronous. For convenience, if Numb = -N (is negative) the effective value is ksmps * N (audio synchronous with k-period boundaries). With N small (e.g. 1) polling is then frequent and also locked to fixed DAC sample boundaries.

Chiptune

Chiptune, or chip music, is music written in sound formats where all the sounds are synthesized in realtime by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of using sample-based synthesis. The "golden age" of chiptunes was the mid 1980s to early 1990s, when such sound chips were the most common method for creating music on computers.

The resultant chiptunes sometimes seem harsh or squeaky to the unaccustomed listener. Chiptunes are closely related to video game music. The term has also been recently applied to more recent compositions that attempt to recreate the chiptune sound, augment it with more complex technology.