Lesson plan
ISPW
The IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation (ISPW) was a hardware digital audio workstation developed by IRCAM 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 on a NeXT Computer (a "cube"). The ISPW could then run a customized real-time audio processing server on the hardware boards controlled by a client application on the NeXT. Each ISPW card had two Intel i860 microprocessors (running at 80 MFLOPS). An additional card with eight channels of audio 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.…
Article summary
The IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation (ISPW) was a hardware digital audio workstation developed by IRCAM 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 on a NeXT Computer (a "cube"). The ISPW could then run a customized real-time audio processing server on the hardware boards controlled by a client application on the NeXT. Each ISPW card had two Intel i860 microprocessors (running at 80 MFLOPS). An additional card with eight channels of audio 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.…
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.