Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] News about sequencers (not my own though!)
From: Eli Brandt (eli_AT_gong.music.cs.cmu.edu)
Date: ke helmi 02 2000 - 14:56:16 EST
Paul Barton-Davis wrote:
> >For general DSP programming, I've given up on languages based on
> >opcodes having audio ins and outs. Should I reconsider? The test
> >cases I've been using are windowed-sinc resampling and FOF synthesis.
>
> I don't know. Why have you given up ? Inefficiency ? Or something else ?
Impossibility. :-) I can't even imagine writing FOF in Csound.
It may be theoretically possible, I'd have to think about that, but
surely it would be a disaster.
> >I haven't downloaded Quasimodo; the picture I get from your web site
> >is of a language like Csound but with flexible routing and a new
> >interface and syntax(es). This is good work (Csound can use it!), but
> >I suspect we're dissatisfied with Csound in different ways.
>
> My primary (or rather, initial) dissatisfaction was the impossibility
> of making Csound SMP-friendly.
Yes, I forgot that; that's a big architectural difference.
> However, there were other issues too,
> and in the end, I don't consider Quasimodo to be that connected to
> Csound in any conceptual sense at all anymore.
They're both unit-generator languages (scalar static dataflow), with a
score/orchestra division, so for my purposes they're in the same
family. Different from Lucid (lazy dataflow) or Sisal (first-order
functional with streams) or Fran (higher-order functional with type
constructors), for example.
> This is actually a disadvantage for some purposes: I had a
> phone conversation with Robin Whittle just before the New Year (yep,
> live from .au!) in which it became clear to me that certain kinds of
> process music are really hard to do without explicit patching: i.e. a
> given "instrument" has to know it is playing around with/sending data
> to some other "instrument".
Yeah, in Aura we had to distinguish between "ugen" and "instrument".
An instrument consists of one or more ugens, connected statically.
Each ugen is wrapped up singly as an instrument, so you have them all
available for dynamic connection.
--
Eli Brandt | eli+@cs.cmu.edu | http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/
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