odot

Odot is a set of externals and language developed by Adrian Freed and John MacCallum, with support from Andy Schmeder, Ilya Rostovtsev, Rama Gottfried, Jeff Lubow, and many others at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) between 2007 and 2016.

As of 2022, odot is developed and maintained by John MacCallum with support from CNMAT, and HfMT Hamburg.

Odot emerged out of a need for an aggregate data type that could be operated upon as it is passed around over patch cords. This aggregation describes a synthesis of control-rate computation in the past, present, and future. Odot requires a host environment (Max/MSP), within which a shim layer (libomax) can operate as middleware between libo and the host itself. The libo library – the current manifestation of Open Sound Control – is utilized at the core, whereby all lower-level OSC calls are made.

The odot system augments dataflow languages like Max/MSP, PD and Node Red with the following:

1. The odot bundle aggregate data type, inspired by and currently encoded with OSC
2. An expression language supporting a diverse collection of ancient and modern programming paradigms including: functional, declarative, imperative, dynamic, delegation-based objects, dynamic class-based objects, aspect-oriented
3. Timing and scheduling primitives to support sequencing and synchronization aspects of media and network programming.