SuperCollider

From Gmedia

SuperCollider is a realtime sound synthesis package by james mccartney. it evolved from a classic macos application (supercollider 1 and 2 and the unfinished and strangely numbered version 3.5b).

classic macos seemed to be a dead end, so sc3.5b was dumped then and Version 3 was born as a native OSX application, source code was released to the public as well, covered by the GPL.

SuperCollider 3 is in fact two applications: a highly optimized sound generating application (the server) and a controlling language (including gui classes) application dubbed sclang. under linux, there is no gui per se, but another program called SCUM, which implements gui elements controlled via osc as well. another newer alternative is SwingOSC based on the java swing classes.

the server and sclang communicate using the osc protocol. although it is possible to send messages to the server directly, its more convenient and more common to have sclang act as a gateway in between.

See the wikipedia entry: SuperCollider

there is much more info here:

• http://www.audiosynth.com - jmc's homepage for his stuff
• http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/supercollider - the main sf project page
• http://supercollider.sf.net - this quite outdated last time i checked
• http://swiki.hfbk-hamburg.de:8888/MusicTechnology/6 - the supercollider swiki.