Open Sound Control (OSC)

Matt Wright and Adrian Freed at CNMAT, UC Berkeley, introduced OSC in 1997. Where MIDI sends seven-bit values on sixteen channels, OSC addresses things by path — /synth/1/cutoff — and carries typed arguments: floats, integers, strings, binary blobs. Packets nearly always travel over UDP, and addresses can contain wildcards that hit several receivers at once.

OSC never became a hardware standard, but it took over the programmable corner of the field: SuperCollider's language and sound server talk OSC to each other, Max/MSP and Pure Data speak it, and TouchOSC turned the tablet into a control surface. The 1.0 spec arrived in 2002 and has barely changed since — a sign either of good design or of everyone doing their own thing anyway.