Introduction to SuperCollider

In this intro to algorithmic music in SuperCollider, we don't have enough time to go too deeply into the pattern library (which is incredibly deep), but we'll go far enough to give you a taste of the possibilities, and we can spend some time at the end of the workshop talking about more advanced techniques.

There is no prior knowledge of SuperCollider necessary for this workshop, but neither are we going to cover any fundamentals of synthesis in SC. If you are new to SC, but have other synthesis environments that you use, you might consider looking into the MIDI out or OSC capabilities of SC.

A background in programming or music (or both) will be very helpful in understanding the material, but is not required.

SuperCollider may be downloaded here.

Online help documentation is here.

Important commands to know in SuperCollider:

'enter' - execute the current line of code (or selected code). On Macs this is shift+return.

CMD+. (command period) - stop all running processes on server

CMD+d - look up the selected text in the help files