Max/MSP and JavaScript
In a previous life I was heavily into digital music production. One popular tool in that area is Max/MSP — a visual programming language for music and graphics. It’s not just used by hackers, many musicians and artists also use it. In some ways it’s more accessible than Processing, and is more adept at audio.
Max/MSP allows you to draw networks of audio processing units and manipulate them in real time. You can interact with MIDI hardware as well.
What’s interesting about Max/MSP is in recent years they’ve added a JavaScript API. The API uses globally available functions and objects, so the API feels a bit like Processing. The company that makes Max/MSP, Cycling74, has a set of tutorials up called JavaScript in Max.
You can use JavaScript to create UIs with OpenGL, so you could create interesting animations as well as scripted audio processing.
If you’d like to see some example patches, try searching for JavaScript in the Max Objects Database. Max is actually commercial software (it starts at $250), but there’s a 30 day demo if you’re interested in experimenting. If you’ve got a Mac you can load Quartz Composer to see a similar type of tool which is focused on video.
