November Meetup: Structured Concurrency and Musical Time

On the 3rd of November we will host another iteration of our monthly Audio Developer Meetup, where Rachel Susser from Ableton, who also co-organizes this meetup, will walk us through structured concurrency and what it means for audio developers. For our short talk, Matthias Rath will present a novel control element for setting times in musical units.

Please notice: this month’s meetup will NOT take place at Ableton!
We are meeting at a new location: 42 Berlin, Harzer Str. 42, 12059 Berlin.

Anyone interested in Audio development is welcome!
Doors open at 18:00, talks start at 18:15. No admission after 18:30.

Please note: Attendance is strictly limited to people who have RSVP’d.

Long talk details
Structured Concurrency for Audio Developers - Rachel Susser
Building on the concept of structured programming, which has been around in computer science since the 1960s, the term “structured concurrency” was coined 10 years ago to describe an approach to concurrent programming that aims to simplify reasoning and reduce bugs. This talk walks through the ideas behind these structured approaches to programming and concurrency before diving into examples relevant to audio developers. These examples will demonstrate how to think about control flow from an architectural rather than a local standpoint, and will also address upcoming C++ library support via the Execution Control Library and the friction that can arise when working with realtime threads.

About the speaker
Rachel Susser is a software engineer with over 10 years of industry experience developing real-time audio software in C++. She has worked at both the operating system and application level for companies including ROLI, Apple, and Ableton, where she currently works on Live’s audio engine. She co-coordinates the Audio Developer Meetup Berlin and is the founder of the Better Code Study Group at Ableton. Rachel is also a musician and co-organizer of the Forgotten Female* Composers concert series.

Short talk details
A Novel Control Element for Setting Times in Musical Units - Matthias Rath
There are various techniques for setting time intervals in musical units (beats, eighth notes, triplets …) in software or hardware tools (instruments, effects, DAWs). Examples include selecting a unit and clicking or moving markers on a grid, typing numbers, or selecting, typing or dragging numbers next to a unit selector. All of these approaches have their pros and cons, but for some of my use cases I found none of them completely satisfactory. I therefore came up with a novel UI control element with a unique combination of features:

• Control by a simple slider, with no typing or context switches
• Arbitrary counts and units
• Seamless adjustment of exact integer or non-quantised values

I want to present this control element as I integrated it into an audio plugin, and show how it can be useful and inspiring in music production.

About the speaker
Matthias Rath is originally a mathematician with a thesis in Algebraic Topology, who later studied electronic composition for two years and pursued a PhD in sound for human-computer interaction. After many years in academia, Matthias moved into software development in both audio and non-audio fields (mostly mobile apps), working as a freelancer and as an employee in settings ranging from startups to the corporate world. Currently, Matthias is taking the AI revolution, as fascinating as it is scary, as a chance to get back to long-planned personal audio projects.