[rectang]

A few questions which spring to mind:

* Can I use SOUL to create freestanding interactive performance environments a la Pure Data?

* What prospects are there for beefing up hardware to run more DSP and bring down latencies? Are there, or will there be open-hardware DSP projects which run SOUL, or open-source runtimes which achieve high performance on standard issue CPUs? If the company behind SOUL goes under (Roli, I think), what happens?

* Could I write a program in SOUL that does real time beat detection given an audio signal, say a steady drum beat (to make things simple)?

[julesrms]

> Can I use SOUL to create freestanding interactive performance environments a la Pure Data?

SOUL does have a JIT compiler and you can live-code it, and you can certainly use it to write programs that generate musical patterns etc.. So sure, the language could be used like that.

Our background and focus has always been more from the pro-audio side of things rather than performance, though, so the tools we've built so far aren't really targeted at performance use-cases, it's more about development of apps and plugins.

> What prospects are there for beefing up hardware to run more DSP and bring down latencies? Are there, or will there be open-hardware DSP projects which run SOUL, or open-source runtimes which achieve high performance on standard issue CPUs? If the company behind SOUL goes under (Roli, I think), what happens?

Right now we've not had the resources to get stuck into that side of things deeply yet - hoping to be able to do more on it this year. (And ROLI aren't going to go under, ha!)

> Could I write a program in SOUL that does real time beat detection given an audio signal, say a steady drum beat (to make things simple)?

Yep, totally the kind of thing we're expecting people to do with it.

[cesaref]

What prospects are there for beefing up hardware to run more DSP and bring down latencies?

Well that's the million dollar question. We're imagining things moving (hopefully) along similar lines to how GPUs have developed, with dedicated processors for audio processing. It's pretty clear though that the current model of distributing binaries for the CPU is not magically going to enable hardware vendors to sell audio accelerator cards, and hence why we feel a change of direction for the audio industry is required.

The way we see this being enabled would be a JIT based approach where the audio driver translates device independent code to run on their given hardware (and the 'soft' rendering on the CPU which is where we currently are for machines without dedicated audio accelerators).

The design of SOUL has this sort of support in mind, with per sample processing and the parallel structure of the DSP still visible within the language, which allows the driver to make threading decisions at the JIT stage, enabling parallelism.

[cesaref]

> Are there, or will there be open-hardware DSP projects which run SOUL, or open-source runtimes which achieve high performance on standard issue CPUs?

The binary release includes a build of the soul command for Bela, which is a very cool low latency board + OS for audio (https://bela.io/) based on xenomai. It's probably as close as we get to open hardware for DSP, and it puts you in the sub millisecond latency range.