Realtime Music Programming using snd-RT

A revolutionary system for programming sound and music in realtime is being presented. The system provides interfaces to extremely efficient high-level and garbageproducing programming languages, which process indivudal samples at a time, sample by sample, in realtime. This is possible by using the Rollendurchmesserzeitsammler garbage collector, the only known conservative garbage collector suitable for hard realtime audio DSP. The name of the systen is Snd-Rt. Snd-Rt lives inside the Snd sound editor and currently consists of a realtime sound engine, a built-in Scheme-like programming language named “RT”, an interface for using the Faust compiler, and an interface for using the Stalin Scheme compiler. Stalin and “RT” can use CLM for DSP operations, while Faust uses its own system. An interactive Lisp interface is provided for all compilers, 1 and they all support very efficient sample by sample processing and strongly timed 2 coroutines. 3 Snd-Rt has been used for custom DSP routine prototyping, 4 interactive sound installations, 5 live improvisation (including use of custom-built hardware), 6 exploratory music programming, 7 surround mixing, 8 and to make general sound applications. 9