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Perspectives on OSC

Annotated bibliography of links to helpful perspectives about the nature and use of OSC.

(alphabetical order)

Joe Armstrong, 2016 “A Badass Way to Connect Programs Together”: “I could collaborate with him by sending him OSC messages over UDP and didn’t have to understand one iota of how his application was built and structured. It didn’t matter all I had to do was understand the messaging protocol.” “Simplicity by Design”

Ilias Bergström (aka The Wizard of OSC), 2020, “What is OSC?”: “OSC gives musicians and developers more flexibility in the kinds of data they can send over the wire, enabling new applications that can communicate with each other at a high level.”

Create Digital Music has over 100 articles tagged opensoundcontrol.

Adrian Freed’s 2021 annotated version of the 2001 ICMC paper “Managing Complexity with Explicit Mapping of Gestures to Sound Control with OSC”, “intented to provide context and readability unavailable in the original pdf.”

James McCartney’s SuperCollider language’s fundamental architecture is based on a division between scsynth the audio-processing “synthesis server” versus sclang the general-purpose programming language, connected via sending OSC to the server. It’s also possible to control scsynth from a different OSC sender.

Dave Phillips, 2008, “An Introduction To OSC”: “OSC’s design addresses and resolves MIDI’s most frustrating aspects, particularly regarding transport speed and the assumptions of use. No restriction is placed on pitch representation or any other musical representation, as long as the data format is supported by the protocol.” Detailed example: AlgoScore drives AVSynthesis.

Wikipedia page


This page of OpenSoundControl website updated Wed Apr 28 11:37:13 PDT 2021 by matt (license: CC BY).