CDP COMMUNITY

Online Forum

Simon Kunath has set up and moderates our Online Forum. We are very grateful for Simon's willingness to undertake this task.

The Forum enables CDP users to share insights, problems and solutions as you use the CDP software and read its documentation.

Our intention is that the Forum should replace direct emails to CDP wherever possible. However, if you experience problems, especially when installing our Free Downloads, please email composersdesktop [at] gmail.com.

If reporting an apparent bug, please be sure to include program name, infile and parameters used and error messages received, so others can try to duplicate the problem. We may post a message to the Forum requesting further information about the problem. The CDP team check the Forum regularly and offer insights and responses as required. Software and documentation updates are posted to the downloads page as soon as possible.

Our Vision

As an organisation our goal is to help composers work with sounds. We envision sound wholly integrated into the fabric of music, which has already happened in popular music, but less so in the realm of 'serious' composition. We seek to create a mutually supportive environment in which practising composers can help each other, both in designing software tools and in using them effectively.

The vast majority of the CDP software has been written by Trevor Wishart, documented by Archer Endrich and maintained by Richard Dobson with help from Trevor re technical details. It is their willingness to share their three decades of work which has made this possible.

We aim to provide new computer tools for sound design, in which the emphasis is on sound transformation in creative musical contexts and a detailed and flexible access to the inner features of sounds. To this end, numerous CDP programs are semi-algorithmic in nature, such as the segmentation routines and the Texture suite, shaping whole multi-event passages of music.

In the long term, we envision processing speeds and interface devices that enable both real-time processing and a new generation of performing instruments, the continued use of off-line alongside real-time operations, and the design flexibility of algorithmic and semi-algorithmic scripting.

We encourage 3rd-party development of software tools that take these ideas further, either evolving the CDP software into new dimensions, or complementing it with like-minded composer tools. To promote future development, we have put the CDP source code online at GitHub and are working to put it into library format, which we will call the CDP-Wishart Libraries, in view of the enormous contribution made by Trevor Wishart.

We coordinate the development of CDP software and would urge interested parties to come forward with ideas you may have for developing or improving our programs.

Featured Composer

Our most recent Featured Composer was Harry-Ed Roland, resident in Berlin and an imaginative CDP user for many years. Sadly, Harry-Ed passed away in September 2022. Archer Endrich has presented a brief personal note here.

We will be aiming to feature another composer in the near future.

History of CDP

Our website includes a brief history that recounts the main events in the evolution of the Composers Desktop Project's software over the past 36 years.