I support an object orientated approach to SAOL.
I would expect such an approach would facilitate software generation
of orchestra code, as well as a more extensible, consistent and
robust environment for manual programming.
Csound (and I think SAOL - it is two months or so since I read the
spec.) lacks many fundamental facilities which are needed for
instruments to communicate with each other. They can't call each
other and there are no global arrays. Nor can the programmer invent
new data types or even handle strings.
The instrument concept is itself highly object orientated, and if
your concept of music fits the "score -> orchestra of independent
instruments" model, then it works well.
I am more interested in setting up collections of interacting
processes and setting them running to see what happens! This is
nearly impossible in standard Csound. My "zak" ugens make it
possible but it requires a great deal of clerical work.
It is a big task to come up with a signal processing approach which
is truly flexible without making too many assumptions about what kind
of musical (or other) structures it will support. To do this so it
can run efficiently is another level of difficulty.
If I had specific suggestions for how to go about this, I would make
them, but I am still trying to learn C++ and developing my own,
"bottom up" approach to software synthesis of sound (or for that
matter moving images). I don't expect to have any useful results for
quite a while.
Steven Curtin mentioned "The Well-Tempered Object", edited by
Stephen Travis Pope. A quick Web search reaveals quite a few
mentions. It is a 1991 MIT Press book, and the editor mentions it in
http://datura.cerl.uiuc.edu/netStuff/mode.html
which describes the Smalltalk based Musical Object Development
Environment. The MODE source code does not seem to have been updated
since 1992.
- Robin
. Robin Whittle .
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