Treffer: Synchronous Programming in Audio Processing: A Lookup Table Oscillator Case Study

International audience ; The adequacy of a programming language to a given software project or application domain is often considered a key factor of success in software development and engineering, even though little theoretical or practical information is readily available to help make an informed decision. In this paper, we address a particular version of this issue by comparing the adequacy of generalpurpose synchronous programming languages to more domain-specific languages (DSL) in the field of computer music. More precisely, we implemented and tested the same lookup table oscillator example program, one of the most classical algorithms for sound synthesis, using a selection of significant synchronous programming languages, half of which designed as specific music languages -Csound, Pure Data, SuperCollider, ChucK, Faust - and the other half being general synchronous formalisms - Signal, Lustre, Esterel, Lucid Synchrone and C with the OpenMP Stream Extension (Matlab/Octave is used for the initial specification). The advantages of both approaches are discussed, providing practical insights to both software developers and language designers regarding the choice of programming language styles when tackling audio applications.