extending this learning-by-stealth approach to more adventurous area such as non-linear filter sounds. While not disparaging the necessity for skilled practitioners eventually to learn the skills of software synthesis in general, our experience in teaching young musicians have led us to this provision of a comprehensive set of synthesis models, which can satisfy the immediate requirement for “cool presets”, and at the same time have sufficient control for exploration and variation. Thus the student of software synthesis can start to experiment with timbre from a secure base but with a wide number of interesting possibilities.

Realtime MIDI and Control

In the previous discussion we have ignored the important areas of performance. If our sound models are attractive, but take too long for the student to hear their attempts, the teaching process will fail. We can summarise this area under the three headings of Realtime, MIDI and control.

The current generation of PC and Macintoshes are easily capable of synthesising a number of these sounds with immediate playback. The work of Gabriel Maldonado⁷

, Ann Arbor and Matt Ingalls⁸ have demonstrated this elsewhere, and we just use it. This is not the stumbling block that it was a few years ago.

Similarly the MIDI capabilities of Csound have been improved by a number of people, and so it is possible to play a PC from a music keyboard. The use of MIDI sliders, or software emulations of them, both as MIDI controllers and directly, do allow students to interact with the software synthesis as the sound is being generated.

Here technology has rescued what was a difficult position a short time ago. We expect to see this area develop and mature in a short time. In this section we have concentrated on sound design aspects. There are similar aids for score generation being developed, but these do not have the maturity for an exposition.

Globalisation or Localisation

It is generally considered that globalisation is a good thing, bringing with in many benefits. There are however two aspects of this which could benefit from a localisation approach in our pedagogical approach. These are language and delivery.

Language

A globalisation brings with it a globalisation of language, and what could be seen as a form of cultural imperialism based on the English language can be a barrier to accepting the new synthesis techniques. In practice it is English which is dominating the globalisation process. It may appear that the two of us have a common advantage here, but although we both claim to speak English, they are two slightly different languages. The version of Csound before 1999 gave error messages in the