Pure Data

Pure Data (or Pd) is a graphical programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works. Though Puckette is the primary author of the software, Pd is an open source project and has a large developer base working on new extensions to the program. It is released under a license similar to the BSD license. Pd is very similar in scope and design to Puckette's original Max program (developed while he was at IRCAM), and is to some degree interoperable with Max/MSP, the commercial successor to the Max language. Both Pd and Max are arguably examples of Dataflow programming languages. In such languages, functions or "objects" are linked or "patched" together in a graphical environment which models the flow of the control and audio. Unlike the original version of Max, however, Pd was always designed to do control-rate and audio processing on the host CPU, rather than offloading the synthesis and signal processing to a DSP board (such as the Ariel ISPW which was used for Max/FTS). Pd code forms the basis of David Zicarelli's MSP extensions to the Max language to do software audio processing.

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