SuperCollider

SuperCollider is an environment and programming language originally released in 1996 by James McCartney for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition.

Since then it has been evolving into a system used and further developed by both scientists and artists working with sound. It is an efficient and expressive dynamic programming language providing a framework for acoustic research, algorithmic music, interactive programming and live coding.

Released under the terms of the GPLv2 in 2002, SuperCollider is free and open-source software.

Starting with version 3, the SuperCollider environment has been split into two components: a server, scsynth; and a client, sclang. These components communicate using OSC (Open Sound Control).

SC Language combines the object oriented structure of Smalltalk and features from functional programming languages with a C family syntax.

The SC Server application supports a simple C plugin API making it easy to write efficient sound algorithms (unit generators), which can then be combined into graphs of calculations. Because all external control in the server happens via OSC, it is possible to use it with other languages or applications.