Introduction to Open Sound Control
& the SuperCollider IDE Workshop

[ View the workshop presentation ]
[ View the game project ]
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0

This project was intended to be the final project for MUMT 306 - Music & Audio Computing I.

It was also a Music Tech Workshop hosted by the Electrical, Computer, and Software Engineering Student Society at McGill (ECSESS)

Goals

The goal of this project is to introduce

  • The Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol standard
  • SuperCollider (sclang) and the SuperCollider IDE (scide)
  • The client-server architecture of SuperCollider (scsynth)
  • Application of OSC in spatialized and real-time audio synthesis

Motivation

I've worked (albeit indirectly) with SuperCollider in the past with project IMAGE at the Shared Reality Lab.

I was blown away by the capabilities of SuperCollider and the joy of creating sounds from simple sinusoid waves that I learned from my Signal Processing classes.

Since OSC is relatively less popular to MIDI, I wanted to spread the word about this amazing technology via a SuperCollider workshop.

Project structure

This project contains 2 main parts:

  • Presentation: An brief introduction & history of the OSC protocol, along with a step-by-step beginner's guide to SuperCollider to create simple sounds.

  • "Running Blobby" game: a Python game that uses SuperCollider to synthesize realtime and spatialized audio effects. (Licensed under MIT License)

Timeline

  • September: Ideation and structural planning of the project.
  • October (1/2) Draft of the presentation and development of the "application".
  • October (2/2) Consulted with my old mentor + finalized project idea.
  • November: Finalized the presentation, workshop plan, and game.
  • November 27th, 2024: Workshop presentation at McGill University.
  • December: Finalized the project and this summary presentation.

Difficulties

The main difficulties were the time constraint, content selection for the workshop presentation, and adapting OSC in Python to work with SuperCollider for the game.

Difficulties: Content selection

SuperCollider is a vast and complex software, and given the 2-hour time limit for the workshop, I had to carefully select the content to be presented to the audience so that they can understand and follow along, assuming zero prior knowledge of the software.

Future work (?)

The project is completed 🎉.

Demo

🧑‍🏫 Workshop Presentation

👾 "Running Blobby" Game

"Running Blobby" Game Demo

Outcomes

The workshop was a success!

The workshop participants had a fun time learning about SuperCollider and making sound effects for the game!

The project can be used for future workshops or as a learning resource for those interested in SuperCollider and OSC.

Thank you! 🎉