Re: sounds and source code

[Conrad Parker <conradp cse unsw edu au>]

On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 10:24:22PM +0000, Mark McGrew wrote:
> I've been pondering...
> 
> If we want to put sounds under the GPL, and the GPL requires that source 
> code (defined as "the preferred format for editing") be made available in 
> the same medium as the binaries, what if we were to create a language for 
> semi-abstract description of audio?

yup :))

if you want a language for audio, you want csound :)

Check out:
http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/linux_csound.html

and for editing csound graphically, Quasimodo:
http://quasimodo.org/

I just realised that if a sound is created entirely as a csound
score or whatever, and seeing that most PCM formats (like WAV)
allow lots of text to be stored, then you could use the WAV file as
both the "binary" and the distribution medium; you could put the
csound score directly into the wav file's comments. The file would
be playable by anyone and anyone could extract the score file if
they have the right tools.

btw. a couple of the authors of sound tools got back to me over the
past few days and said they'd include support for editing and saving
the text data in sound files, so hopefully we'll actually be able to
do this reliably before long.

Conrad.