Please excuse the interruption - I thought some of this might be
pertinent to what Lawrence was saying about recording sound poetry,
but if not then please just ignore: the conversation about Wordsworth
and autobiography/influence etc. is vastly more intrinsically
interesting and worthwhile than the techie blether that follows, and I
may in any case be attempting to teach my grandmother (so to speak) to
suck eggs...

Recently I've been playing with some free/open source software for
sound recording, generation, manipulation and mixing. When it comes to
audio, software is only part of the picture: even if it's all free,
getting the best results still depends on having a reasonably good (in
particular, low-latency) soundcard and a reasonably fast processor.
But the cost of hardware is constantly decreasing: I don't have any
high-end gear myself, but can get very good results on what was a
middle-range PC (about 750 quid - and no, I still haven't finished
paying for it) two years ago. Before that, I was using a PIII 450Mhz
PC with rather older and slower memory and hard drive, which wasn't
great but was nevertheless adequate for all the sonic manipulation
(ring modulation, filtering, reverb, chopping up samples and other
such jazz) that went into the first four w/trem CDs. It is in fact
still in use, or so I understand: the person I gave it to apparently
does audio work of his own with it. The fact that I gave it away
should tell you something about the availability of such hardware - I
wouldn't have got a lot for it even if I'd tried to sell it, and there
are similar systems available second-hand for not that much.

Back to the software, which you can get for nothing (assuming access
to an internet connection). Nothing free (as in beer) has worked
better for me than Buzz, which is Windows-only - see
http://www.buzzmachines.com for downloads. It has a plug-in model for
generators and effects, and an enormous library of both (again, all
free as in beer). It's possible to set up signal chains of some
complexity - splitting off a signal, running it through a high-pass
filter, running the filtered part through a delay then recombining it
with the original signal in a ring modulator, say - and to run
recorded samples through those signal chains, re-recording the
results. Buzz is essentially a tracker (a type of fairly rudimentary
sequencer), but the ability to combine plug-ins in this way is what
gives it its real power.

Audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ - is a perfectly good GPL
audio recorder and editor, good for capturing sounds, treating them in
various ways, and chopping them up. It runs on Windows, Linux and OS
X.

Ardour - http://ardour.org/ - is the nearest thing Linux currently has
to CuBase. It's very good, but difficult to set up; Linux isn't
particularly friendly to multimedia applications, although the
architecture is improving (i.e. everything you need is a bit
cutting-edge, and consequently tends to be either flakey or badly
supported). The main requirement is a piece of software called Jack -
http://jackit.sourceforge.net/ -  which allows multiple processes to
pipe audio to one another: it's a kind of low-latency digital
patchbay. There are an increasing number of small modules that work
with Jack, such that one can compose quite complex signal processing
environments out of a collection of self-contained modules. Fun if you
have the time; I confess I've had problems getting it to work even on
quite recent Linux distributions, but there's a dedicated multimedia
distro called DeMudi, based on Debian, that simplifies the process
quite a bit.

Speaking of things that are fun if you have the time, CSound is
amazingly powerful. But also amazingly hard, being based on a kind of
assembly language for sound design. It's worth a look if the
expression "assembly language for sound design" doesn't bring you out
in a cold sweat. I kind of need a spare life to do all that stuff
in...

There are other things I haven't mentioned - I'm told GarageBand on
the Mac is quite fun - but my main point is that for audio at least
one no longer needs access to dedicated studios full of amazingly
expensive gear to do interesting work.

best,
Dominic