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Comment by chaosprint | Hacker News Reader

Since my master's studies, I have been researching this topic. I highly recommend Professor Thor Magnusson's book, "Sonic Writing" (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/sonic-writing-9781501313868/), as well as all of his research.

For example, in this article, he discusses algorithms as "Algorithms as Scores" (https://cris.brighton.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/268697/Mag...).

These concepts have profoundly influenced my creation of Glicol (https://glicol.org/).

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I'm a big fan of Glicol, my main issue with it is the lack of documentation. There's some great getting started guides, but beyond that not too much (for example, an example for glicol-cli is provided using the built in BD drum, but I can't find any reference for all drums available).

As I say, it's otherwise perfect for me, it's sound design capabilities are really fantastic

How does Glicol differ from Supercollider (https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider)?

There are indeed some similarities. I was influenced by SuperCollider (SC). One of my master's graduation projects was a system based on SC: https://github.com/chaosprint/Packing. Both SC and Glicol are written in low-level languages—SC in C++ and Glicol in Rust. Inspired by SC's reusable scsynth, I created glicol_synth as an independent audio library.

However, their syntax differs greatly. Glicol's syntax is designed for live coding, prioritizing simplicity and readability and it's actually partially inspired by modular synth(for example: https://glicol.org/demo#minitechno and https://glicol.org/tour#fm), while SC's syntax inherits from Smalltalk, adhering to standard OOP. SC's ecosystem is mature, offering GUI development, various sound processing methods, and robust multi-channel support. In contrast, Glicol's sound processing is still very minimal and experimental. Once the basic architecture, like multi-channel and audio graph handling, is established, adding sound processing modules will be linear.

Additionally, Glicol's support for both browser and CLI is a highlight.

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