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What is Open Sound World?

Open Sound World, or OSW, is a scalable, extensible programming environment that allows musicians, sound designers and researchers to process sound in response to expressive real-time control. OSW combines a familiar visual patching paradigm with solid programming-language features such as a strong type system and hierarchical name spaces. OSW also includes an intuitive model for specifying new components using a graphical interface and high-level C++ expressions, making it easy to develop and share new music and signal-processing algorithms.

Feature Specifications and Design Goals include:

* Multi-platform
* Decoupled GUI, VPL and computational kernel
* Open Source, Open Architecture
* Rapid prototyping of object primitives (the Externalizer)
* Multiprocessor support
* Data type-safe, type-polymorphic and data type agnostic
* Explicit control of parallelism and determinism
* Open XML file format for OSW programs and subprograms (patches)
* Object primitive programming accessible to non-expert C++ programmers
* High-performance signal processing
* Reliable low-latency timing and scheduling
* Modern programming, documentations, packaging and distribution techniques
* Integrated network programming, OpenSound Control (OSC).
* Dynamic, demonstration-based help system and tutorials
* Baseline objects supersetting functions available in existing music languages

The History of OSW:

by Adrian Freed, Research Director/Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT)

One of the key factors in the birth of OSW was impatience with the constraints, accessibility and development directions of related visual music programming languages- MAX/MSP, FTS, jMax, and Pd. MAX/MSP was limited to the Macintosh platform and was hard to add new features to and had no multiprocessor support. FTS was locked into IRCAM hardware, jMax was burdened with Java and has limited popularity, and Pd was missing many of the features of Max/MSP. Because of the accretion of objects in these systems there were too many objects for musicians to learn to use with many surprises.

The specification for OSW became the union of the good features of previous systems combined with a desire for greater ease and use and simplicity. The catalyst for actually developing OSW was a combination of the emergence of the new C++ standard and the arrival of a fearless programmer at CNMAT, Amar Chaudhary.