The Implementation of Nyquist, A Sound Synthesis Language1

Nyquist is an advanced functional language for sound synthesis and composition. One of the goals of Nyquist is to achieve efficiency comparable to more conventional Music N synthesis languages such as Csound (Vercoe 1986). Efficiency can be measured in space and time, and both are important: digital audio takes enormous amounts of memory, and sound synthesis programs are computationally intensive. The efficiency requirement interacts with various language features, leading to a rather elaborate representation for signals. I will show how this representation supports Nyquist semantics in a space and timeefficient manner. Among the features of the representation are incremental computation, dynamic storage allocation and reclamation, dynamic instantiation of new signals, representation of infinite sounds, and support for multi-channel, multi-sample-rate signals.