Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Computer Music: A View from Seattle

1988; The MIT Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3680333

1531-5169

John Rahn,

Music and Audio Processing

The point of view here is that of an unregenerate user of software sound synthesis, which has until very recently been hampered by lack of available computing power. First the article describes an ideal, currently nonexistent system called the Vaporware Board, which will however become practical in the near future. It is designed for software sound synthesis either in real time or in time. Currently available systems of comparable power are parallel and vector processor supercomputers; they are examined as possible hosts for software sound synthesis. The article goes on to describe Music4P, an existing portable music synthesis program written in Fortran whose architecture is aimed at running in real time or composer's time on vector and parallel processing systems. Music4P is compared to Music4BF and to Cmix. Next, the article describes an existing inexpensive music workstation based on the IBM AT that runs Music4P. The total system includes an optional connection to a mainframe computer or supercomputer, which runs the same software. Finally, the article describes a portable Lisp kernel being developed for music workstations, which now comprises a data structure, some database functions, and a composer's front end program called Lispfront.