Best Practices for Open Sound Control

The structure of the Open Sound Control (OSC) content format is introduced with historical context. The needs for temporal synchronization and dynamic range of audio control data are described in terms of accuracy, precision, bit-depth, bit-rate, and sampling frequency. Specific details are given for the case of instrumental gesture control, spatial audio control and synthesis algorithm control. The consideration of various transport mechanisms used with OSC is discussed for datagram, serial and isochronous modes. A summary of design approaches for describing audio control data is shown, and the case is argued that multi-layered information-rich representations that support multiple strategies for describing semantic structure are necessary.