Abstract
In celebration of the 25th anniversary of Pure Data, this essay discusses the development of audio programming up to the present, and considers the role that Pd can continue to play in the computer music of the future.
Highlights
Audio ProgrammingFrom the viewpoint of academic computer music, which has traditionally been very interested in developing innovative approaches to creating sound in the digital domain, audio programming faces two important challenges in the 21st century: first, the major inventions of new sound synthesis and processing methods seem to have peaked by the mid-1990s; and second, there are so many powerful audio DSP plugins for every manner of synthesis and processing that one may ask if computer musicians still need to learn how to write procedural code
Pd inhabits an important space within audio programming, being inherently oriented toward at least two kinds of programming – visual dataflow in the creation of Pd patches, and text-based procedural programming in the creation of externals in C code
The symposium invited the authors of Csound, Kyma, Max, Pd, and SuperCollider to discuss their ideas for the future of music software. 20 years later, all five of these systems continue to flourish
Summary
From the viewpoint of academic computer music, which has traditionally been very interested in developing innovative approaches to creating sound in the digital domain, audio programming faces two important challenges in the 21st century: first, the major inventions of new sound synthesis and processing methods seem to have peaked by the mid-1990s; and second, there are so many powerful audio DSP plugins for every manner of synthesis and processing that one may ask if computer musicians still need to learn how to write procedural code. We’ll discuss an example of using procedural coding to develop a processor for Pd that would be difficult or impossible to realize through visual dataflow programming alone
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