Stephen Travis Pope: Sound and Music Processing in SuperCollider (1998)

“SuperCollider is a powerful and flexible programming language for sound and image synthesis and processing. It was developed by James McCartney of Austin, Texas, and is the result of more than five years of development, including the Pyrite and Synth-omatic systems from which SuperCollider is derived. The somewhat odd name of the language is derived from its creator’s obsession with the superconducting supercollider project that was planned to be undertaken in his home state of Texas, but never funded.

The SuperCollider compiler and run-time system has been implemented on Apple Macintosh and Be computers (more ports are projected), and can execute quite complicated instruments in real time on “middle-class” Macintoshs (see the notes below on its performance). This book is a step-by-step tutorial on SuperCollider programming; it is aimed at musicians who want to use it for musical sound synthesis and processing.”

“This book is an introduction to the SC language aimed at readers who have some programming background (such as knowing another sound synthesis language or a general-purpose language like C or Smalltalk). It is not meant to substitute for the SC manual, to which I indeed refer the reader in numerous places.”

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Code examples