[pie]

I am very happy whenever I see hackers taking interest in audio software. There has been some fascinating progress in technology/processing ability in the last 5 years or so, but it's always fun to get back to the basics (as Bloopasphone does).

One sound creation tool that might be of interest to hacker/music types is Reaktor: (http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?id=reaktor5_us). It's something like a visual programming language with an underlying scripting language, and bundled with a dizzying number of modules and programs.

In Reaktor, casual users get ordinary interfaces to bundled preset virtual instruments but as you might imagine, you can dive very, very far down the rabbit hole.

[wheels]

Reaktor now actually is almost 10 years old; used to be called Generator. (I worked at Native Instruments before founding Directed Edge.)

Similar to Reaktor is also Max/MSP and its uglier, but open source, cousins jMax and Pd.

For things a little closer to code there are CSound and SuperCollider and the less-mature-but-more-elegant ChucK.