SuperCollider
James McCartney's Realtime Sound Synthesis Programming Language

Colby Leider
Department of Music
Dartmouth College
Hanover NH 03755

In 1996, James McCartney introduced SuperCollider, a realtime sound synthesis programming language for the PowerPC Macintosh with roots in his synthesis program Synth-O-Matic and his numerous MAX objects. The language, which somewhat resembles Smalltalk and C/C++, currently contains over 600 built-in functions, including oscillators, filters, random number generators, file input/output routines, MIDI support, and envelope followers. In addition, its realtime operation makes it well-suited for live electronic music. File input/output routines may be used to read a text file score, thereby allowing a user to treat SuperCollider as a Music V-style score processor and synthesis engine. However, SuperCollider's real strength and uniqueness lies in its inherent lack of distinction between the archetypal score and orchestra. In contrast to Csound, a single program may contain both compositional algorithms and synthesis routines. Furthermore, the language provides users with access to an audio stream at any desired level, including individual samples. And in the tradition of HMSL, hierarchical compositional and gestural structures may be easily constructed.

SuperCollider has quickly and quietly gained a devoted following. Stephen Travis Pope has written a tutorial bookSound and Music Processing in SuperCollider and has organized the first SuperCollider conference at the University of California at Santa Barbara (to be held February 27-March 1, 1998). Several academic institutions have already integrated the language into their curricula, including Florida International University (Kristine Burns), the University of California at Santa Barbara (Stephen Travis Pope and Curtis Roads), Peabody Conservatory (Ichiro Fujinaga), and Dartmouth College (Larry Polansky).

McCartney notes that version 2.0, to be released in 1998, will be fully object-oriented with a comprehensive class library and many new features, among them multiple control rates, sample-accurate event start times, on-the-fly patch building, and dynamic allocation of signal buffers such as delay lines. The SuperCollider home page is located at http://www.audiosynth.com.