SuperCollider

SuperCollider is an environment and programming language originally released in 1996 by James McCartney for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. SuperCollider is an environment and programming language originally released in 1996 by James McCartney for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. Since then it has been evolving into a system used and further developed by both scientists and artists working with sound. It is an efficient and expressive dynamic programming language providing a framework for acoustic research, algorithmic music, interactive programming and live coding. Released under the terms of the GPLv2 in 2002, SuperCollider is free and open-source software. Starting with version 3, the SuperCollider environment has been split into two components: a server, scsynth; and a client, sclang. These components communicate using OSC (Open Sound Control). The SC language combines the object-oriented structure of Smalltalk and features from functional programming languages with a C-family syntax. The SC Server application supports simple C and C++ plugin APIs, making it easy to write efficient sound algorithms (unit generators), which can then be combined into graphs of calculations. Because all external control in the server happens via OSC, it is possible to use it with other languages or applications. SuperCollider's sound generation is bundled into an optimised command-line executable (named scsynth). In most cases it is controlled from within the SuperCollider programming language, but it can be used independently. The audio server has the following features: Supernova, an independent implementation of the Server architecture, adds multi-processor support through explicit parallel grouping of synthesis nodes. The SuperCollider programming language is a dynamically typed, garbage-collected, single-inheritance object-oriented and functional language similar to Smalltalk, with a syntax similar to Lisp or the C programming language. Its architecture strikes a balance between the needs of realtime computation and the flexibility and simplicity of an abstract language. Like many functional languages, it implements functions as first-class objects, which may be composed. Functions and methods can have default argument values and variable length argument lists and can be called with any order of keyword arguments. Closures are lexical, and scope is both lexical and dynamic. Further features typical of functional languages are supported, including creation of closures via partial application (explicit currying), tail call optimization, list comprehensions, and coroutines. Specifics include the implicit expansion of tuples and the stateless pattern system. Its constant-time message lookup and real-time garbage collection allows large systems to be efficient and to handle signal processing flexibly.