UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation presents Stride, a language for sound synthesis, processing, and interaction design. With a novel and unique approach for handling sampling rates as well as clocking and computation domains, Stride prompts the generation of highly optimized target code. Optimization is achieved by giving the user of Stride control over the Stride code generator through its syntax. The optimizations render Stride an ideal language to target resource-constrained devices such as microcontrollers. Stride is a declarative language and adopts features from dataflow languages. With only two syntactic constructs, Stride is easy to learn. Through resource abstraction and separation of semantics from implementation, a wide range of computation devices could be targeted such as microcontrollers, system-on-chips, general-purpose computers, and heterogeneous systems. Users of Stride can write code once and deploy on any supported hardware.

After presenting the challenges of targeting resource-constrained microcontrollers with popular music programming languages in use today for sound synthesis and processing, a new programming language and its syntax are introduced to address these challenges. This is followed by demonstrating how the language enables its user to control the code generation process to yield efficient and optimized target code. Next, the semantics of the language and some of its core building blocks are presented in detail followed by the user-controlled concurrency model built into the language. Designing interaction using some of the core blocks is then presented through a set of examples followed by some of the advanced building blocks of the language. Finally, the language is presented as part of an encompassing development environment and all of its components including the integrated development environment and the compiler.