Welcome to the official homepage for DISSCO, Digital Instrument for Sound Synthesis and COmposition.
This new website should be a little nicer and should provide an easier way to keep our users informed about the project. For more information about the components of DISSCO (LASS, LASSIE, and CMOD) please refer to the links on the sidebar to the right.
LASS
LASS is a library for additive sound synthesis. It is based on theoretical contributions by Hans G. Kaper, Senior Mathematician at Argonne National Laboratory and Sever Tipei, Professor of Music at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and manager of the Computer Music Project of the UIUC Experimental Music Studios. LASS has also benefitted from their experience with two other additive synthesis systems, DIASS_M4C and DISCO.
Unlike its predecessors, LASS is not a MusicN type of program: it uses function evaluations instead of table look-ups and does not require a "score". Instead, it produces an XML file which is used only as a record and not as input. LASS can generate an arbitrary number of sounds, each of them containing an arbitrary number of partials, and allows the user detailed control over each partial. LASS is also unique in the way it allows musicians to specify the loudness of a sound, a non-linear function of amplitude. To arrive at a specified perceived loudness, the amplitude of a sound is adjusted using the ISO equal loudness curves and a number of critical bands.
Three main design goals have guided this project: expandability, ease of use, and efficiency. The architecture of LASS is very modular. No doubt, new features will need to be added and future developers must be able to easily expand the system. The library was also designed to be user friendly. The interfaces to classes were made as clear as possible and kept consistent across objects. Extensive use of references instead of pointers help insure good memory management. Finally, LASS must also be efficient since sound synthesis is computationally intensive.
The general framework of the library and many of its features were written by Braden Kowitz. Over a two and half year period, many students, participants in the "Advanced Computer Music" seminar at UIUC have also contributed to the project.