High-Performance Computing, Music Composition, and the Sonification of Scientific Data

this article we describe some of the capabilities of DIASS and the environment in which it operates and indicate how we intend to develop it further for scientific sonification. DIASS Conceived as a composer's tool giving the user minute control over every conceivable detail of a sound, DIASS is intended to run on machines that offer both high speed and large amounts of memory [3]. It consists essentially of two parts: the instrument proper, which computes the samples, and an editor, through which the user enters and modifies the instructions for the instrument. The DIASS instrument functions as part of the M4C synthesis language developed by Beauchamp and his associates at the University of Illinois [4]. As part of the project, the instrument and relevant parts of the M4C code were redesigned for a distributed-memory environment. The parallel implementation uses the standard MPI message-passing library [5]. The Instrumen