Now for some more geeky stuff.

One of the components of my FYP was a communication mechanism between controllers, mapping engins and synthesizers for sound synthesis. Now, the main part of my FYP, the mapping engin, was designed to be cross-platform, and portable. Thus, we needed a communication mechanism able to support this.

MIDI has been one of the most popular communication mechanism for synthesis for many years. But it has had its days. We need a more extendible mechanism, which is not as hardward layer dependent like MIDI. Enter Open Sound Control (OSC).

“OpenSound Control (OSC) is an open, transport-independent, message-based protocol developed for communication among computers, sound synthesizers, and other multimedia devices.”

I won’t go into the details. You can get them here and here if you are interested.

Anyway, so as a part of my FYP I extended the Java implementation of the OSC protocol, JavaOSC. Here is a paper I co-wrote on it. We called it JOE (Java OSC Extension). Now, don’t laugh. It was supposed to go with MOE (Microcontroller OSC Ethernet), but that’s another story.

Anyway, so I am still working on JavaOSC, though not alone. I have teamed up with the original creator of JavaOSC and other amazing people in the community, to continue this project. You can find out more about it at the sourceforge site. It’s free, in both ways, so feel free to use it, or even better to ‘abuse’ it. ;)