sonic surrounds

MusicKit is an object-oriented software system for building music, sound, signal processing, and MIDI applications. It has been used in such diverse commercial applications as music sequencers, computer games, and document processors. Professors and students in academia have used the MusicKit in a host of areas, including music performance, scientific experiments, computer-aided instruction, and physical modeling. The MusicKit was the first to unify the MIDI and Music V paradigms, thus combining interaction with generality (Music V, written by Max Mathews and others at Bell Labs four decades ago, was the first widely available “computer music compiler”).

So it’s not particularly new, but has been ported to Mac OS X by Leigh Smith and the sourceforge repository holds some useful recent Core Audio code for learning from.

Acousmodules offer a large variety of tools for multichannel composition.

This page on their site lists the features of a large range of multitrack and plugin host software packages that may be useful in multichannel composition from mono, stereo, 5.1 to many more channels. An interesting survey since I have recently become interested in exploring currently available audio processing environments that will support 5.1 and greater multichannel sound composition.

Something else to check out some time - spectral manipulation tool - Freq Tweak.

It’s obviously old news to some (last release was 0.6.1 - 7 July 2004), but it’s news to me and looks very intriguing. I wonder how quickly an Audio Unit could be whipped up to control just the processing functions….

A very interesting project that I need to check out:
SoundCrusher Audio File Manipulation Framework by Marek Bereza.

To quote the above web page, SoundCrusher is:

an object-oriented framework that provides manipulation operations on audio files in many different formats. It builds another layer of abstraction on top of libsndfile, which is an audio file i/o library, so SoundCrusher supports all the formats supported by libsndfile.

It sounds like the idea is to facilitate fast editing of large sound files - eg, I’ve often had the problem of top’n'tailing say one hour of audio - ie snipping a section from the start and end and saving the result to a new file. The save always takes a long time as a temporary copy of the original file is altered in virtual memory and saved out to a new file. It sounds like SoundCrusher is able to provide a quicker save by performing the edit just by rearranging a list of pointers to regions within the original file.

I have yet to try it out, but will post back my findings when I do.