The Composers Desktop Project (CDP) is an international cooperative network based in the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
that has been developing software for working with sound materials since 1986. Working on a cooperative basis and motivated by user-specific compositional needs, the project has focused on the development of precise, detailed and multifaceted
DSP-based sound transformation tools. Currently, CDP provides sound transformation software (named after the project itself) for Windows and Mac OS X that has been evolving for over 20 years.
In 2014 the main components of the CDP were released as an open-source package licensed under the
LGPL. Makefiles are now available for Windows, OSX, and Linux.
Originally, after a study to determine if it was possible and/or feasible to port
CMusic from
UNIX
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
mainframe systems, the project released the CDP software along with corresponding ''SoundSTreamer'' hardware for the
Atari ST[CDP History http://www.composersdesktop.com/history.html ] and later ported the software to
DOS. The software tool-set is designed specifically to transform
sound samples mostly via
offline processing (non-
real time); the software is considered complementary to real-time processing and
audio sequencers.
References
Further reading
*A. Endrich (1996), Composers' Desktop Project: a musical imperative, ''Organised Sound'', Volume 2, Issue 01, Apr 1997, pp 29–33.
*R.W Dobson (1993)
''The Operation of the Phase Vocoder''– ''a non-mathematical introduction to the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)'', a CDP publication, Somerset.
*Wishart T. (1994), ''Audible Design: A Plain and Easy Introduction to Sound Composition''. Orpheus the Pantomime Ltd. ({{ISBN, 978-0951031315).
Electronic music software
Acoustics software
1986 establishments in the United Kingdom