The COSMO (Csound On Stage Musical Operator) project is an open source project about making a DIY effect pedal using the small and inexpensive computer Raspberry PI running Linux with Csound. Csound is a powerful, multi-platform, real-time sound-processing environment that enables musicians to design their own instruments and audio-effects by writing a few lines of Csound code. The current design
propose a guitar pedal design with regular quarter jack-in and jack-outputs, 3 footswitches and 5 k**b potentiometers. Csound 6.0 (Csound Python API) is running on a Raspberry Pi micro-computer, equipped with an additional sound card for low latency audio input and audio output. An advantage of such a design is the straightforward inclusion of individual designed digital audio-effects (like granular frequency modulation) into a regular live-electronics setup and provide direct haptic control of Csound to the performing musician. Such a musical device may also enable non-programming instrumentalists to use Csound in their analog live-performance setups. Do-it-yourself (DIY) build instructions for the pedal-box and a SD-card image with all required software installed and preconfigured, will be provided on the related COSMO project wiki-page. In future work we aim to carry out workshops with musicians and music students to show them how to build such devices and how to design individual audio-effects with Csound. This may result in a Csound live-performer community, sharing sound modification Csound patches, developed for such stand alone musical devices.
