Distributed polyphonic music synthesis

Abstract

Music synthesis often relies on very computationally intensive algorithms. Various strategies have been used to deal with the complexity, including using simpler, but more limited algorithms, using specialized hardware, and executing them in non-real-time for later playback. Although several implementations using parallel hardware have been done, very little has been done with distributed implementations on clusters of workstations. Distributed music synthesis is typical of distributed multimedia applications which use multiple servers to do computations generating high-bandwidth audio/video data, based on low-bandwidth control information. This work demonstrates distributed music synthesis and describes the effects of using different communication protocols and networks. The implementation is a version of the Csound music synthesis package which has been modified to distribute the synthesis load to multiple servers. The network performance should also be applicable to applications which use a high-bandwidth pipeline of processes, which would be appropriate for audio and video post-processing.