by Theo Verelst, don't hesitate to add experience / thoughts / ideas
While being in a small place in france, having the opportunity to run linux on a fairly fast notebook, I though I'd take up a long ago idea line to make a sound program with textual interface, which is then controlled by a tcl/tk script.
I've started a page here:
http://82.168.209.239/Soundtest
Where also bwise and pcom are mentioned, which are part of the package.
The idea is that the tcl script starts a excutable 'soundtest', in this case on linux, but the same runs very well on windows XP, too, which waits for a socket connection with the control script, and listens to commands which the tcl/tk script sends it, to make different sounds.
The first example is addition of harmonics, lets say like an organ drawbar, the principal (sinusodial) components can be added in various ratios to get different sound colours. The Tk sliders control this in real time, and the bwise canvas gets back a graph from the sample table in the sound program to show the resulting waveform.
Sources and executables are on the page, and I've added the cygwin/windows version.
It's fun to do sound stuff with Tcl, see also Sound envelope generator with a lot of useful tcl examples. Several (advanced) sound programs are based on interpreters and list processing such as LISP, also current scientifically used ones, so why not aim for tcl/tk (which is probably a more developed language, and well portable) in such a role.