SuperCollider
More info
- Creator
- James McCartney
- Released
- License
- GPL-3.0
- Website
- supercollider.github.io
A programming language for sound synthesis, split into an interpreter that thinks and a server that makes noise, with OSC in between.
James McCartney released SuperCollider in 1996 as commercial Mac software and open-sourced it in 2002. Since version 3 it has been two programs: sclang, an object-oriented language with a strong Smalltalk accent, and the audio server scsynth, which builds networks of unit generators (UGens) and plays them. The language talks to the server over OSC, so the server can just as easily be driven from Python or anyone else's code.
That split made SuperCollider the backbone of the live-coding scene, where music is written as code in front of an audience. TidalCycles, for one, is a Haskell language whose sound usually comes from a SuperCollider server running in the background.