Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists

Chapter 4. Sound files and sound manipulation

This chapter covers

• Storing sound in computers
• Loading and playing sound files in ChucK using SndBuf
• Working with stereo files
• Modulo, a cool new, musically useful, arithmetic operator
• Making your own drum machine using samples

So far you’ve used only oscillators and noise to make your sounds and compositions. But there’s much more to music composition and production than just these sounds. There are countless types of sounds in the world and in music. In this chapter, we’ll show you how to use sound files in ChucK. Sound files, such as .wav, .aif, or other files you have on your computer or have seen on the internet, are sometimes called samples, for reasons you’ll see soon. Samples are a quick ...