Making soft synths

Earthenrock

Right now I'm a junior in college Majoring in Computer Science, and am looking for a way to combine my studies with some of my interests. My interests being mostly in music.

I'm having trouble finding any resources online on how to code even a simple digital synthesizer.
I'm familiar with Csound which is interesting, but it's instruments that are made on a command line have to be scripted to be played, and I want to be able to create a stand-alone program, that can be played with either the standard keyboard used for typing or a usb keyboard. I see tons of free VST instruments at KVR and am wondering how people create those.

I'd figure creating simple single oscillator/filter synths would be a good step towards exploring the possibilities of sound design with a computer, which is how digital granular synthesis came to be.

If anyone can make any suggestions or point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it.

EggyToast

I assume then that you're familiar with SDKs, in which case you might be interested in, say, the VST SDK:

http://ygrabit.steinberg.de/~ygrabit/public_html/index.html

Perhaps you're a mac & linux user, though, and you want to make audio units, using Apple's AU SDK:

http://developer.apple.com/audio/audiounits.html

There's a bunch of sites related to VST development, such as this one:

http://www.axiworld.be/vst.html

I've also read about a lot of windows VST instruments being created with a development environment called Synthmaker:

http://synthmaker.co.uk/

but personally they all sound bland and uninspired to me. They might get you pointed in the right direction.

If you're less of a geek than I'm assuming, you might be more into a 4th gen language like MAX: http://cycling74.com/

Does that help?

Earthenrock

Those links definitely help. synthmaker comes bundled with FL Studio which I have(although you're not able to compile your vst instruments). It's great for building synthesizers but it's a audio plugin itself and no code is involved, rather sample rates, audio outs, and such are all assembled via a GUI. In my case, I'd like to create this on my own.

Thanks a bunch.