SAOL: The MPEG-4 Structured Audio Orchestra Language
Eric D. Scheirer, Barry L. Vercoe · Computer Music Journal · 1999
: The MPEG-4 standard, which will be published in October 1998, contains extensive provisions for sound synthesis as well as traditional methods of audio compression. At the heart of MPEG-4 Structured Audio, the sound-synthesis framework, is a new music-synthesis language called SAOL. This language, based on the Music-N model, is specified and defined fully in the MPEG-4 International Standard; a real-time implementation must be embedded in any device conforming to the full MPEG-4 Audio standard. In this paper, the structure and capabilities of SAOL are discussed, especially in comparison with other music languages. A discussion of the role of international standardization in the future development of computer-music tools is also presented. 1 Introduction Since the beginning of the computer-music era, tools have been created which allow the description of music and other organized sound as concise networks of interacting oscillators and envelope functions. Originated by Max Mathews wi...