A group of us from the Jamoma project have spent quite a bit of time in the past couple of weeks working on a paper for NIME regarding our Open Sound Control (OSC) schema, and the syntax we use to address various parts of our system.

The process has been rigorous and, to some extent, exhausting. Behind every corner has been a whole new can of worms. When we thought we had solved a conundrum, there would be three more popping up.

But in the end, I feel very confident that we nailed it. The key observation came from Trond when he realized that OSC, as it is presented in the spec, is based on constructs from functional programming (e.g. C). But what we are doing with OSC in Jamoma is based on classes and object-oriented design (e.g. C++).

While taking on the topic of making OSC object-oriented would be a mammoth task, I think that the work we are currently doing in Jamoma is a definite step toward thinking about OSC addressing in a fundamentally different way than I have seen others doing up to this point.

Of course, this probably means we’ll have to re-write Jamoma yet again! ;-)