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Home Information Classes Download Usage Mail List Requirements Tutorial
The Synthesis ToolKit in C++ (STK) is a set of audio signal processing and synthesis classes and algorithms written in C++. You can use these classes to create programs that make sounds with a variety of synthesis techniques. This is not a terribly novel concept, except that the Synthesis ToolKit is extremely portable (it's mostly platform-independent C and C++ code), and it's completely user-extensible (no libraries, no hidden drivers, and all source code is included). We like to think that this increases the chances that our programs will still work in another 5-10 years. In fact, the ToolKit has been working continuously for nearly 8 years now. STK currently runs with "realtime" support (audio and MIDI) on SGI (Irix), Linux, and Windows computer platforms. Generic, non-realtime support has been tested under NeXTStep, Sun, and other platforms and should work with any standard C++ compiler.
The Synthesis ToolKit is free for non-commercial use. The only parts of the Synthesis ToolKit that are platform-dependent concern real-time audio and MIDI input and output, and that is taken care of with a few special classes. The interface for MIDI input and the simple Tcl/Tk graphical user interfaces (GUIs) provided is the same, so it's easy to experiment in real time using either the GUIs or MIDI. The Synthesis ToolKit can generate simultaneous SND (AU), WAV, AIFF, and MAT-file output soundfile formats (as well as realtime sound output), so you can view your results using one of a large variety of sound/signal analysis tools already available (e.g. Snd, Cool Edit, Matlab).
The Synthesis Toolkit is not one particular program. Rather, it is a set of C++ classes that you can use to create your own programs. A few example applications are provided to demonstrate some of the ways to use the classes. If you have specific needs, you will probably have to either modify the example programs or write a new program altogether. Further, the example programs don't have a fancy GUI wrapper. If you feel the need to have a "drag and drop" graphical patching GUI, you probably don't want to use the ToolKit. Spending hundreds of hours making platform-dependent graphics code would go against one of the fundamental design goals of the ToolKit - platform independence.
For those instances where a simple GUI with sliders and buttons is helpful, we use Tcl/Tk (which is freely distributed for all the supported ToolKit platforms). A number of Tcl/Tk GUI scripts are distributed with the ToolKit release. For control, the Synthesis Toolkit uses raw MIDI (on supported platforms), and SKINI (Synthesis ToolKit Instrument Network Interface, a MIDI-like text message synthesis control format).
Perry Cook began developing a pre-cursor to the Synthesis ToolKit (also called STK) under NeXTStep at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University in the early-1990s. With his move to Princeton University in 1996, he ported everything to C++ on SGI hardware, added real-time capabilities, and greatly expanded the synthesis techniques available. With the help of Bill Putnam, Perry also made a port of STK to Windows95. Gary Scavone began using STK extensively in the summer of 1997 and completed a full port of STK to Linux early in 1998. He finished the fully compatable Windows port (using Direct Sound API) in June 1998. Numerous improvements and extensions have been made since then.
The Toolkit has been distributed continuously since 1996 via the Princeton Sound Kitchen, Perry Cook's home page at Princeton, Gary Scavone's home page at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), and the Synthesis ToolKit home page. The ToolKit has been in included in various collections of software. Much of it has also been ported to MAX/MSP on Macintosh computers by Dan Trueman and Luke Dubois of Columbia University, and is distributed as PeRColate. Help on real-time sound and MIDI has been provided by Tim Stilson, Bill Putnam, and Gabriel Maldonado.
This software was designed and created to be made publicly available for free, primarily for academic purposes, so if you use it, pass it on with this documentation, and for free. If you make a million dollars with it, give us some. If you make compositions with it, put us in the program notes.
Some of the concepts are covered by various patents, some known to us and likely others which are unknown. Many of the ones known to us are administered by the Stanford Office of Technology and Licensing. The good news is that large hunks of the techniques used here are public domain. To avoid subtle legal issues, we will not state what's freely useable here, but we will try to note within the various classes where certain things are likely to be protected by patents.
STK is free and we do not guarantee anything. We've been hacking on this code for a while now and most of it seems to work pretty well. But, there surely are some bugs floating around. Sometimes things work fine on one computer platform but not so fine on another. FPU overflows and underflows cause very weird behavior which also depends on the particular CPU and OS. Let us know about bugs you find and we'll do our best to correct them.
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