See also Adagio , Guido (Hoos et al., 1998), MUSIC-XML , and Lillypond . In spite of the success of these examples, music is not so restricted and well-defined that it does not need the power of general-purpose programming languages. Another important factor for most computer musicians is the programming environment. In earlier days of computing, programs were prepared with a simple text editor, compiled with a translator, and executed by the operating system.

One way to make computation more efficient is to compute samples in vectors or blocks. Audio computation requires the program to follow links to objects, call functions, and load coefficients into registers. All of this overhead can take as much time as the arithmetic operations on samples. With block computation, we compute block-by-block instead of sample-by-sample. Thus, much of the computational overhead can be amortized over multiple samples.

Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder, developed his first computer … Read More

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