A Language for Interactive Audio Applications

Interactive systems are difficult to program, but high-level languages can make the task much simpler. Interactive audio and music systems are a particularly interesting case because signal processing seems to favor a functional language approach while the handling of interactive parameter updates, sound events, and other real-time computation favors a more imperative or object-oriented approach. A new language, Serpent, and a new semantics for interactive audio have been implemented and tested. The result is an elegant way to express interactive audio algorithms and an efficient implementation.