The IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation (ISPW) was a hardware

DSP DSP may refer to: Computing * Digital signal processing, the mathematical manipulation of an information signal * Digital signal processor, a microprocessor designed for digital signal processing * Yamaha DSP-1, a proprietary digital signal ...

platform developed by

IRCAM IRCAM (French: ''Ircam, '', English: Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) is a French institute dedicated to the research of music and sound, especially in the fields of avant garde and electro-acoustical art music. It is ...

and the Ariel Corporation in the late 1980s. In French, the ISPW is referred to as the SIM (''Station d'informatique musicale''). Eric Lindemann was the principal designer of the ISPW hardware as well as manager of the overall hardware/software effort. It consisted of up to three customized DSP boards that could be plugged into the expansion

bus A bus (contracted from omnibus, with variants multibus, motorbus, autobus, etc.) is a road vehicle that carries significantly more passengers than an average car or van. It is most commonly used in public transport, but is also in use for cha ...

on a

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Computer (a "cube"). The ISPW could then run a customized real-time audio processing

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

on the hardware boards controlled by a

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application on the NeXT. Each ISPW card had two

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microprocessors (running at 80 MFLOPS). An additional card with eight channels of

audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound * Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum * Digital audio, representation of sou ...

I/O was also available for multi-channel sound recording and playback. A three-board ISPW provided what was at the time unsurpassed signal processing and audio synthesis power on a single workstation. A single ISPW card cost approximately $12,000US (not including the computer), which made it prohibitively expensive outside of research institutes and universities. And the I860 board : The main server software developed by IRCAM for the ISPW was called FTS ("Faster Than Sound"). The main NeXT client application was a graphical program called Max, developed by

Miller Puckette Miller Smith Puckette (born 1959) is the associate director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts as well as a professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, where he has been since 1994. Puckette is known for aut ...

. A commercial version of Max (without the FTS server) was licensed by IRCAM to Opcode Systems (and, later,

Cycling '74 Cycling '74 (also known as "C74" and stylized as '74) is an American software development company founded in 1997 by David Zicarelli, headquartered in San Francisco, California and owned by Ableton. The company employs the digital signal processi ...

). Max/FTS eventually migrated to a software-only application for

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and DEC Alpha computers. It is the direct predecessor to jMax. See also Pd.

External links

A brief history of MAX
from IRCAM Computer music Computer workstations NeXT Digital signal processors {{Microcompu-stub