The synthesis of music by a Computer was born in 1957 when an IBM704 in New York City slowly computed a 17 second "piece" composed in what was probably the first audible example of a new musical scale with my program, Music 1. The program was very limited, but many limitations were overcome in a sequence of successor programs culminating in Music 5, which was finished in the 1960’s. Subsequently, others have written programs that both added powerful new features and ran on the many new computers that rapidly developed. Today, Csound, written by Barry Vercoe is, in my opinion, the best and most popular software synthesis program. In addition to new features, it is written in the C language, which is universally available and likely to remain so in the future. Thus, music written in Csound can be expected to have a long technical lifetime in the sense that it can be played on future computers.

Until recently, general-purpose music programs all had one major restriction — they could not be used for live performance because computers were not fast enough to synthesize interesting music in real-time, that is to say it took more than one second to synthesize a second of sound. Special purpose computers called digital synthesizers overcame this limitation. But real-time synthesizers brought with them a new major problem — rapid obsolescence. The commercial lifetime of a new synthesizer is only a few years and therefore music written for such machines cannot be expected to be playable in a decade.

Live performance with a general purpose program is now possible in Vercoe's new Extended Csound program — a superbly efficient program which makes rich complex music in real-time on today's fast processor chips and which can be expected to run even faster on tomorrow's chips. Today, because of the universality of the C language, not only can Csound be compiled and run on general purpose processors such as a Macintosh G3 or a Pentium II, but it can be run on digital-signal-processing (DSP) chips which have C compilers. Thus a parallel processor using a multiplicity of DSP chips can provide almost unlimited musical power for a reasonable cost.

One of the crucial factors contributing to the success of Music 5 language was my book, The Technology of Computer Music, which described the program in detail so it could be used and modified; it was intended both as a tutorial and as a reference. The Csound Book, conceived of and edited by Richard Boulanger, fulfills these same needs for Csound.