Open Sound Control

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Open Sound Control (OSC) is a protocol for networking sound synthesizers, computers, and other multimedia devices for purposes such as musical performance or show control. OSC's advantages include interoperability, accuracy, flexibility and enhanced organization and documentation.[1] The first specification was released in March 2002.[2]

Motivation[edit]

OSC is a content format developed at CNMAT by Adrian Freed and Matt Wright comparable to XML, WDDX, or JSON.[3] It was originally intended for sharing music performance data (gestures, parameters and note sequences) between musical instruments (especially electronic musical instruments such as synthesizers), computers, and other multimedia devices. OSC is sometimes used as an alternative to the 1983 MIDI standard, when higher resolution and a richer parameter space is desired. OSC messages are transported across the internet and within local subnets using UDP/IP and Ethernet. OSC messages between gestural controllers are usually transmitted over serial endpoints of USB wrapped in the SLIP protocol.

Features[edit]

OSC's main features, compared to MIDI, include:[1]

Open-ended, dynamic, URI-style symbolic naming scheme
Symbolic and high-resolution numeric data
Pattern matching language to specify multiple recipients of a single message
High resolution time tags
"Bundles" of messages whose effects must occur simultaneously

Applications[edit]

There are dozens of OSC applications, including real-time sound and media processing environments, web interactivity tools, software synthesizers, programming languages and hardware devices. OSC has achieved wide use in fields including musical expression, robotics, video performance interfaces, distributed music systems and inter-process communication.

The TUIO community standard for tangible interfaces such as multitouch is built on top of OSC. Similarly the GDIF system for representing gestures integrates OSC.

OSC is used extensively in experimental musical controllers, and has been built into several open source and commercial products.

The Open Sound World (OSW) music programming language is designed around OSC messaging.[4]

OSC is the heart of the DSSI plugin API, an evolution of the LADSPA API, in order to make the eventual GUI interact with the core of the plugin via messaging the plugin host. LADSPA and DSSI are APIs dedicated to audio effects and synthesizers.

In 2007, a standardized namespace within OSC called SYN, for communication between controllers, synthesizers and hosts, was proposed,

Notable software with OSC implementations include: