Last update: 28 Feb 2000
Bonneville Software, in Utrecht, Holland, has developed CPS. CPS is a Java-based realtime programming environment for audio, MIDI, and other media & I/O. It allows you to visually patch together DSP algorithms using the SAOL core opcodes and control them in real-time. There is a free demo version available. Contact Niels Gorisse for more information.
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has a 3-year funded Ph.D. position available at the Audio-Visual Communications Laboratory under the supervision of Prof. Martin Vetterli. The candidate will perform research in the domain of audio and musical signal processing. The focus of this project is on efficient representations of acoustic signals for feature extraction, musical instrument recognition, automated transcription, structured audio coding and digital audio effects. Possible topics include physical and perceptual modeling, adaptive wavelet transforms and atomic representations. Please e-mail inquiries or applications to Dr. Gianpaolo Evangelista, Gianpaolo.Evangelista@epfl.ch, DSC-LCAV, Ecublens - CH-1015 Lausanne SWITZERLAND.
Creative Technology Ltd. and Silicon Engineering have joined forces to create new audio technology, ideas, and products. Investigation of MPEG-4 SA is a key part of their strategy. They are seeking audio programmers and sound designers with experience in SAOL and other software synthesis languages to form their team. Contact Lee Ray, leer@emu.com.
SSEYO limited are looking to recruit two committed, talented, and motivated music software developers to join their expanding development team. Must be willing and able to work from SSEYO's offices in England. One of these positions is for an Audio/Engine developer with C/C++ skills, and ideally SAOL/MPEG-4 skills as well. Send email to jobs@sseyo.com.
The Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium has several openings for research engineers and/or Ph.D. applicants to work on implementation of the MPEG-4 SA tools on DSPs and dynamically reconfigurable hardware. Contact Prof. R. Lauwereins, KULeuven-ESAT/ACCA, Kard. Mercierlaan 94, B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium, Tel. +32-16-32 10 35, Fax. +32-16-32 18 13, e-mail: Rudy.Lauwereins@esat.kuleuven.ac.be
King's College London has a three-year studentship available in the extraction of structured representations from musical audio. This research applies to both MPEG-4 SA transmission and future work on the MPEG-7 standard. Contact Professor Mark Sandler, Department of Electronic Engineering, Kings College London, Strand, LONDON WC2R 2LS, UK
John Lazzaro and John Wawrzynek at the University of California at Berkeley are developing a new implementation called sfront. Sfront is a SAOL-to-C compiler released to the public under the GNU Public License.
The ThreeDSPACE project is a partnership between the Integrated Systems Lab of the EPFL and STUDER Professional Audio of the Harman group. It aims at the complete implementation of the MPEG-4 AudioBIFS standard (including SAOL) for rendering by surrounding loudspeaker systems. SAOL will be used to encode pre-processing algorithms before the spatial filtering and as high dynamic sound generator. Contact: Giorgio Zoia
Richard Dobson, who also is the "backroom boy" of the Composers Desktop Project, is making improvements for Win32 platforms for saolc and sfront. He is also considering a CDP version of SAOLC that would include more improvements in ease of use.
Michael Gogins is writing Noise, a GUI interface and Java API to interface to SAOL. This will allow more sophisticated interactive music-applications to be built with SAOL.
Ross Bencina is working on a new real-time p-code interpreter called sarun. sarun is specifically intended to be incorporated into other interactive audio-processing systems. It will be released under the GPL, and Ross is looking for anyone else that wants to help.
Of course, the most recent draft of the standard is available from the SA home page. You need to have this if you're interested in developing new SA-compliant tools. The official final standard will be available from the ISO in a few months.
Eric Scheirer has written a lot of papers for journals and conferences about SAOL, AudioBIFS, and the other advanced tools in MPEG-4. You can download some of them here. Many of them are more about theoretical matters than practical issues of writing implementations and making music.
Ross Bencina has made a quick reference sheet for all the SAOL built-in opcodes and unit generators.
Matt Wright at Berkeley's CNMAT and Eric Scheirer of the Media Lab wrote a translator that converts SDIF sound files into SA bitstreams.
Michael Gogins is working on embedding sfront in a VST API wrapper so that you can write plugins for Cubase VST in SAOL.
The CS division of the EECS department at the University of California at Berkeley, in the USA.
The Integrated Systems Center at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland.
The Department of Electrical Engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Belgium.
The Audio and Music Technology Group in the EE department of King's College London, in England.
The Media Department at the Weimar University of Architecture, in Weimar, Germany.
Ivast is using SA technology as part of their multimedia platform for broadband Internet content and applications.
The Joint E-Mu/Creative Tech Center helped design the SASBF part of MPEG-4. Now they, together with Silicon Engineering, are investigating the use of SA in next-generation audio compression as well as advanced music synthesis and processing.
Sseyo Software makes Koan, a very cool automated-ambient-music generator. They are going to start work on a new version based on SA technology "very soon."
STUDER is interested in putting SA technology into digital mixers and other studio equipment.