Why a video synth for SuperCollider?
Luke Nihlen - Scintillator Developer
After trying Pure Data, Max + Jitter, and building a large modular synthesis rig, including several video synthesis modules by LZX Industries and Brown Shoes Only, I heard about SuperCollider from a friend and gave it a try. While I find the SuperCollider approach to synthesis to resonate the most with me creatively, I was surprised to discover that the video synthesis capabilities seemed to be so limited. Because SuperCollider is open source, it occurred to me that one way I could contribute back to the development of SuperCollider would be to provide a video synth myself. More selfishly, Scintillator represents some of the software that I’m most excited about using when working with SuperCollider.
Because Scintillator is distributed as a SuperCollider Quark, it means that I don’t have to be concerned necessarily with bloating the core software or adding a bunch of unneeded dependencies and complexity for users that don’t want to explore video synthesis. But, for those who do, the goal is to build a high-performance video synth with extraordinary creative and expressive depths, while maintaining as much as possible an intuitive usability that “just makes sense” for anyone familiar with SuperCollider.
Scintillator Components
In keeping with the client/server architecture of SuperCollider, Scintillator consists of two components:
| Scintillator Quark | A SuperCollider Quark is a redestributable unit of code and documentation for SuperCollider. The Scintillator classes that facilitate controlling the video synth from SuperCollider are distributed as a Quark, and can be installed via conventional means using the Quarks object inside of SuperCollider. |
| scinsynth server | The Scintillator video synthesis engine, similar to scsynth or supernova as provided with SuperCollider. This is a high-performance C++ program that uses Vulkan for hardware-accelerated graphics rendering. The scinsynth binary is distributed separately from the Quark but will be available for download in precompiled release versions from GitHub. Like the SuperCollider synthesis programs, scinsynth is controlled primarily by OSC, a network protocol with strong support from the SuperCollider language, as well as others. While not officially within scope of the Scintillator project itself, it is expected that programming languages outside of SuperCollider can control scinsynth via OSC in a manner very similar to scsynth or supernova. |
Scintillator Features
The following is an overview of features that are either planned or already implemented for Scintillator. However, the GitHub Issues List remains the canonical list of issues and features planned for Scintillator.
| Feature | State | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware-Accelerated Video Synthesis | Done/Ongoing | Because the Scintillator synth uses Vulkan, the next-generation graphics API, for all video rendering, it is ready to take full advantage of the power of modern graphics hardware. |