Software Sound Synthesis

• Computer music as a field has been likened to a building with a sign on it saying "Best Eats in Town." Many people go into this building expecting to find an elegant restaurant with a parchment menu, formidable wine list, and pleasant, efficient, even charming service. What they find instead, to their surprise, is a shiny, enormous, extremely modem kitchen, with abundant supplies of every kind of foodstuff in voluminous, refrigerated storage. Indeed, the "Best Eats in Town" are available here, but only to those willing to learn to cook! (Moore et al. 1983)

There have historically been three distinct classes of electroacoustic music instruments or systems: tape-based musique concrète studios; modular analog synthesizers of, for example, Moog, Buchla, ARP, and EMS; and software-based sound synthesis systems as described in the landmark book The Technology of Computer Music (Mathews 1969), which described the Music V sound synthesis program Mathews developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories.
The technology of Music V-style languages will be described below. A major factor in the wide use of Music V during the 1970s was the fact that it is written almost entirely in Fortran; its predecessors were generally written in assembly language and were therefore not portable among machine architectures.
This technology was widely used during the 1970s in the form of several Music V descendants that ran on mainframe computers of the day, most notably for portable Fortran, Music IVBF written by Godfrey Winham and Hubert Howe at Princeton University, Music360 (developed by Barry Vercoe also at Princeton), which ran on IBM System 360-class machines, and MUS10 (developed by David Poole and extended by Tovar at Stanford University), which was used on the Digital Equipment Corporation DECSYSTEM-10 family. The 1980s saw a further steady increase in the availability of SWSS systems in the form of systems based on DEC PDP- 11 computers using Vercoe's Music-l l, and later DEC VAX11 machines running the CARL/cmusic system developed by F. Richard Moore and D. Gareth Loy at the University of California, San Diego.
More recently, we have seen the rise of the "computer music workstation," including diverse configurations using personal computers and DSP subsystems such as the York University Composer's Desktop Project CDP (Atkins et al. 1987), and, of course, the plethora of less flexible but real-time-capable MIDI-based computer music systems. Figure 1 shows a partial genealogy of the Music V family of languages and related systems-defined as those based on a software implementation of the unit generator instrument model and the function/note list score model. Another article (Pope 1992) presents an in-depth discussion of the engineering aspects of computer music workstations using modern technology and introduces several of the systems listed in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Time-line of Music V-like SWSS systems. The figure shows a partial timeline of software sound synthesis packages, starting with the early languages developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories by Max Mathews. The systems named here are described in the text.

• Early SWSS Literature
  
• Current SWSS Packages

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