This is perfectly correct. See:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/

Eric Scheirer, a student of Barry Vercoe who teaches at MIT Media Lab and is the original author of Csound, developed Structured Audio Orchestra Language (SAOL) as an extended version of Csound with more procedural programming semantics (if-else, for loops, blocks, etc.).  He even got it accepted as an MPEG-4 standard.

The idea is, the language is easy to program in like C or Python, and it is a general-purpose programming language powerful enough so that users can write their own opcodes in the language itself.

Unfortunately, the best SAOL compiler is sfront by John Lazzaro (website above), and it only compiles SAOL code to C code, which then must be compiled with a C compiler. 

I have experimented with sfront. It sounds fine and is easy to build.

The idea was that someone would write a fast runtime compiler, or implement one in a DSP chip, but nobody ever did. That's a shame, I think. It would have been a tidy solution to the whole software synthesizer problem, and it would be great to have an internationally accepted standard that would probably be taken up by game programmers, set-top boxes, musical instrument manufacturers, etc and expand the user base for software synthesis languages by several orders of magntitude.

In meantime, Csound now has user-defined opcodes, and SuperCollider is arguably more powerful than SAOL. So the whole point is kind of moot now.

Somebody could probably take the SAOL language definition and the sfront opcodes C code, and use MzScheme or CLISP or OCaml to produce a fast runtime. But not me.

Regards,
Mike



-----Original Message-----
From: David Akbari 
Sent: Nov 20, 2005 8:25 PM
To: csound@lists.bath.ac.uk
Subject: [Csnd] MPEG-4 Structured Audio

Hi List,

I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on the comment from 
this page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSound

quote:
  "Csound is the underlying language for the Structured Audio extensions 
to MPEG-4."

What are the Structured Audio extensions to MPEG-4 and how is Csound 
used in their implementation ?


-David

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