Cecilia

Graphic User Interface to Csound

screenshots | downloads | documentation | mailing lists | project page

Welcome on the new Cecilia webpage. Bug reports, user feedback, suggestions, new developers are welcome. Please use the mailing lists at the bottom of the page.

Cecilia 2.0.5 has been released:   download   install howto

Cecilia is a graphic user interface for the sound synthesis and sound processing package Csound. Cecilia enables the user to build very quickly graphic interfaces with sliders and curves to control Csound intruments. It is also an editor to Csound with syntax highlighting and a built-in reference. Cecilia is also a great tool to explore the parameters of a new opcode in an interactive and intuitive way.

Cecilia was designed by and for musicians and sound designers. First and foremost, we wanted to make the most powerful and open-ended sound processing language readily usable for composers, researchers and sound artists. Creators will find in Cecilia all the tools necessary to make sound what they want it to be. Included are all the traditional sound processing devices such as EQs, compressors and delays adapted for the most simple applications and the wildest imaginable sonic contortions.

If you are an advanced Csound user you may think that FLTK widgets have now made Cecilia redundant. This is not the case, as it is much faster to build an interface with Cecilia, and there are many features not yet covered by the FLTK opcodes, like logarithmic faders and curves. The downside for the advanced user is that the new opcodes are not yet inculded in the built-in reference. New opcodes are none the less perfectly functionnal in Cecilia, as Cecilia is merely an interface to Csound.

Cecilia is written in Tcl/Tk so as to be portable. So far, Cecilia has been released for Windows, Linux, IRIX, MacOS X, and MacOS. The IRIX and MacOS ports are currently not maintained but newer versions might just work on these platforms. Cecilia is released under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.

Cecilia was initially developed by Alexandre Burton and Jean Piché of the Faculté de Musique at Université de Montréal from 1995 to 1998. It was then ported to Linux by Dave Philips. Stephan Bourgeois and Yves de Champlain also contributed. It is currently maintained by Bill Beck, Phil Sobolik, and Hans-Christoph Steiner.

News

• Cecilia featured in Electronic Musician Magazine

Coming Soon!

• Jean Piché's new code
• unified multi-platform codebase

Changes to version 2.0.5

• MacOS X port
• Netscape dependency fixed
• uses modern apps as default helpers

What needs to be done

• Merge Jean Piché code into the SourceForge CVS
• Amplitude information not displayed for csound ver>4.16
• Include csound 4 documentation and rebuild database
• "Auto Rename" compatible with sox and play
• Use the HTML browser specified in the Preferences
• Update Cecilia documentation
• Your feedback from the mailing list...

Requirements

• csound ver>= 3.47
• Tcl/Tk

Mailings Lists

There are three active, though fledgling, Cecilia lists: users and devel. For support and suggestions you can post to either of those:

Cecilia Announce
cecilia-announce Archives | Subscribe/Unsubscribe/

Cecilia Developers
cecilia-devel Archives | Subscribe/Unsubscribe

Cecilia Users
cecilia-users Archives | Subscribe/Unsubscribe/

Links

Tcl/Tk

Tcl is the language that Cecilia is written in. Tk is the GUI ToolKit for Tcl. You need to have Tcl/Tk installed in order for Cecilia to work.

cSounds.com

Dr. Richard Boulanger has created a portal for all things csound. You can get everything from csound binaries to articles to complete compositions on this site.

Composition electroacoustique CECILIA

There are the two other key Cecilia sites. This first is the site of the original creators, which seems to be no longer maintained.

UC Davis' RE4M

Bill Beck at UC Davis' electronic and computer music studio, RE4M, has ported Cecilia to Windows and added some modules. We hope to merge the code so all Cecilia users can benefit from Bill's work.

Mac OS X installer for Csound-4.23f07

Hans-Christoph Steiner built an installer package for Csound. Just download, double-click, and click thru the installer.