SELF-REPLICATION: HOW TO DO MORE USING LESS
Author: Krzysztof Czaja
One of the tiny annoying vices which still compromise the many virtues of Pd, preventing its wider adoption by computer music community, is the lack of implicit multi-instantiation mechanism. According to common expectation, any implementation of a sound synthesis algorithm should qualify for seamless abstraction into a polyphonic instrument. For Pd, this is not yet the case, and a proposal of how to fill the gap is described in this paper.
An integral part of Pd is instantiation-time evaluation. Currently, this device is limited to a simple form of parametrization of object arguments. One can imagine other possibilities of user-guided computation performed during instantiation phase. This proposal explores one such possibility.