Faust: A Programming Language For Sound (with Romain Michon)

I’m always interested in what factors shape the design of a programming language. This week we’re taking a look at a language that’s wholly shaped by its need to support a very specific kind of program - audio processing. Anything from creating a simple echo sound effect, to building an entire digital instrument based on a 17th-century harpsichord.

The language in question is Faust, and this week we’re joined by Romain Michon, who works on and teaches Faust, as we look at how it’s designed, what kind of programmers it's for, and how it does the job of turning audio-pipeline definitions into executable code.

And one of the surprising parts of that compilation strategy is the decision to have it compile to multiple targets, from the expected ones like C and Rust, to the exotic destination of FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). FPGAs are like reprogrammable circuit boards, and Romain dives into Faust’s attempts to go from a high-level description of an audio program, all the way down to instructions that tell a chip exactly how it should wire itself.

So rather aptly for a technology podcast, we start this week with what your ear can hear and go all the way down to logic gates and circuit boards…

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Try Faust in the Browser: https://faustide.grame.fr/

Faust Online Course: https://www.kadenze.com/courses/real-time-audio-signal-processing-in-faust/info

FPGAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array

VHDL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL

Verilog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verilog

Grame: https://www.grame.fr/

The (Strawberry Jam) Gramophone: https://www.grame.fr/articles/gramophone

Gramophone Workshops: https://www.grame.fr/evenements/atelier-gramophones-65ca16b19fec4

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