Sound + Process deconstructs new electronic and experimental works through conversations with their composers. These artists all belong to the online community lines (http://llllllll.co). Hosted and produced by Dan Derks.

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This account contains examples from a programming language for audio.
This language is still very experimental and is not available. 

WHAT

This programming language is called:

"A tool for the expression of sound as pure form."

It is an interpreter for a language for creating and transforming sound. The
language is mostly functional, stack based and uses postfix notation similar to
FORTH. It represents audio and control events using lazy, possibly infinite
sequences. It intends to do for lazy sequences what APL does for arrays: provide
very high level functions with pervasive automatic mapping, scanning, and
reduction operators. This makes for a language where short programs can achieve
results out of proportion to their size. Because nearly all of the programmer
accessible data types are immutable, the language can easily run multiple
threads without deadlock or corruption.

WHY

Other languages that inspired this one:
    APL, Joy[1], Haskell, Piccola[2], Nyquist[3], SuperCollider[4].

APL and FORTH (from which Joy derives) are both widely derided for being
write-only languages. Nevertheless, there has yet to be a language of such
concise expressive power as APL or its descendants. APL is powerful not because
of its bizarre symbols or syntax, but due to the way it automatically maps
operations over arrays and allows iterations at depth within arrays. This means
one almost never needs to write a loop or think about operations one-at-a-time.
Instead one can think about operations on whole structures.

Here is a great quote from Alan Perlis[5] on APL, which that also reflects my
interest in this way of programming :
"What attracted me, then, to APL was a feeling that perhaps through APL one
might begin to acquire some of the dimensions in programming that we revere in
natural language — some of the pleasures of composition; of saying things
elegantly; of being brief, poetic, artistic, that makes our natural languages
so precious to us."

The Joy language introduced concatenative functional programming. This generally
means a stack based virtual machine, and a program consisting of words which are
functions taking an input stack and returning an output stack. The natural
syntax that results is postfix. Over a very long time I have come to feel that
syntax gets in between me and the power in a language. Postfix is the least
syntax possible.

There are several reasons I like the concatenative style of programming:
    Function composition is concatenation. 
    Pipelining values through functions to get new values is the most natural
        idiom.
    Functions are applied from left to right instead of inside out. 
    Support for multiple return values comes for free. 
    No need for operator precedence. 
    Fewer delimiters are required: 
        Parentheses are not needed to control operator precedence.
        Semicolons are not needed to separate statements.
        Commas are not needed to separate arguments.


When I am programming interactively, I most often find myself in the situation
where I have a value and I want to transform it to something else. The thing to
do is apply a function with some parameters. With concatenative programming this
is very natural. You string along several words and get a new value.


REFERENCES    

1. http://www.kevinalbrecht.com/code/joy-mirror/joy.html

2. http://scg.unibe.ch/research/piccola

3. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~music/nyquist/

4. http://supercollider.sourceforge.net

5. http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis78.htm


Sounds from the 73-75.com Homebuilt Serge Modular synthesizer. All tracks are unattended live recordings (unless otherwise mentioned) and none of them feature any additional effects or equipment, in order to better represent the actual sound of paperface-era Serge. See the individual track descriptions for more information.

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