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<TITLE>Tao User Manual -- Background to <B>Tao</B>'s design and implementation</TITLE>
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<H2>Background to <B>Tao</B>'s design and implementation</H2>
During my Music Technology masters degree at the University of York I was
impressed by freeware audio and synthesis tools such as <CODE>Csound</CODE>.
One of the things that impressed me about Csound in particular was that
it was a synthesis language and allowed a finite set of primitive
building blocks to be assembled in an infinite number of ways.
<P>However, my experience as a musician playing a variety of acoustic
instruments told me that whilst Csound's unit generator approach was
quite powerful, it also had several shortcomings. For example, when
playing an acoustic instrument such as a guitar or even just experimenting
with `found sounds' there is something very direct and intuitive about
the mode of experimentation. If you want something to make a louder
and brighter sound you just hit it harder!
<P>Whilst Csound's unit
generator approach does allow you to design instruments with input
parameters and feed different values into these inputs in a score,
it doens't allow you to think directly in terms of forces, velocities,
spatial positioning of excitations etc. So I wanted to set out to
design a synthesis program which would carry on the tradition of
programs like Csound, in providing an open-ended synthesis language,
but would be capable of creating much more tangibly physical
instruments. Another item which was high on the agenda was to be able
to visualise the instruments.
<P><B>Tao</B> arose out of my interests in a number of different areas
including musical performance, electroacoustic music, computer
modeling of complex dynamical systems, cellular automata, and
computer graphics.
<P>I have thought for a long time that whilst GUIs (graphical
user interfaces) are invaluable tools in certain situations there are
still many things which are more elegantly expressed in text/language
form. Take general computer programming languages for example, or
the rapidly growing number of `mark-up languages' such as HTML, XML,
VRML. Text is a very powerful tool for communicating structured
ideas and has the advantage that it can serve as the basis for
more user friendly GUI-based tools to sit on top.
<P>It is for this reason that I concentrated my efforts on designing a
text based interface to <B>Tao</B> which would be simple to use, clear to read
and above all accessible to musicians with some degree of technical
competency (having used tools such as Csound for example). Having
stated this however it is likely that the format of the language and
the lack of a GUI will be addressed in the future, along with several
other aspects of the user interface.
<P><B>Tao</B> was originally developed as part of my DPhil at the
University of York, England and then subsequently during a one year
visiting research fellowship to the Australian Centre for the Arts
and Technology at the Australian National University in Canberra.
<P>My DPhil addressed the question of precisely why it is that digitally
synthesised sounds often lack the <EM>warmth</EM>, <EM>life</EM>, and
<EM>organic</EM> qualities of acoustically produced sounds, whether
musical in the traditional sense or not. What came out of this work,
apart from a thesis of course, was <B>Tao</B>.
<P>As mentioned earlier on I wanted a system which would be capable of producing
<EM>organic sounds</EM>. The term <EM>organic</EM>
is quite difficult to define precisely but my thesis <EM>Synthesis
of Organic Sounds for Electroacoustic Music: Cellular Models and the
TAO Computer Music Program</EM> does a better job of
addressing the issues than I have scope to do here. Very briefly though
the term <EM>organic</EM> is used to refer to sounds which are:
<P><UL><LI>complex
<LI>fluid
<LI>dynamic
<LI>coherent
<LI>lively
<LI>suggestive of physical and energetic causality
</UL>
<P>The term <EM>coherence</EM><A NAME="1"> is</A> used to refer to the fact that in sounds
produced by physical means, the transient behaviour, the perception
of the sound having been produced by some physical mechanism and
the overall character of the sound hang together very well. This cannot
be said of many digitally synthesised sounds, even those produced by
some physical modeling techniques. This problem of synthesising
<EM>complex</EM>, <EM>coherent</EM> and <EM>organic</EM> sounds was the main
focus of the whole project.
<P>The original design goals which have been adhered to throughout <B>Tao</B>'s
development were to produce a system which would have the following
features:
<P><UL><LI>capable of synthesising a wide variety of acoustic and
instrumental-like sounds with organic qualities;
<LI>relatively straightforward to use, making physical modeling accessible
to those without a strong maths or physics background without compromising
the power or flexibility of the tool;
<LI>based around a flexible and open-ended synthesis language following
in the tradition of other synthesis languages such as Csound (this objective
is ongoing, the current synthesis language used by <B>Tao</B> is only one possible
language for controlling it).
</UL>
<P>
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<tr><td colspan="3" class="addr"><!-- bottom panel --><ADDRESS><FONT SIZE=-1>©1999,2000 Mark Pearson
<A HREF="mailto:m.pearson@ukonline.co.uk">m.pearson@ukonline.co.uk</A> April 30, 2000</ADDRESS><BR></td></tr><!-- end bottom panel --></table></BODY></HTML>
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