William Franklin Walker
Software systems that generate samples have long been a vital tool for computer music. These systems are written in procedural languages like C and FORTRAN, and they run on single processor computers. One of their main problems is that they are too slow. Kiwi is a new software sample generator that takes advantage of shared-memory multiprocessors like the Encore Multimax. Systems like MUSIC 4BF assume that the sound of each note is entirely independent of the sounds of other notes; Kiwi uses this assumption to parallelize software synthesis at the note level. Kiwi is written in C++, an object-oriented language which renders Kiwi considerably easier to understand and maintain than previous systems. Interesting issues raised while implementing Kiwi include optimizing scheduling algorithms, trading speed against storage, and parallelizing postprocessing algorithms like reverberation.