This release also makes it one thing obvious to me: while in development, Fnk will always target the latest version of Flash that’s publicly available, without worrying about user penetration or anything of the sort. Old versions of Fnk will still be available as always, so this shouldn’t be a problem.

Also, Fnk development is close to resuming, now that I finally have a computer at home with everything installed. I can’t wait to play with those features. As a personal playground of Flash capabilities and the code that’s used for them, not being bound to artificial limitations like that is quite liberating.

Dataflow programs are something a bit new to me – I haven’t heard of them until last year. The more I research into the subject, the more I’m surprised – this is something that has been going on for quite a while.

Recently, I’ve been specially mesmerized by some publications from the Computation Structures Group of the MIT. These guys have been on the subject for quite a while.

There’s something eerie about using a paper from 1974 that has been typed on a standard typewriter and then scanned into a PDF (Memo-110) as a reference to a project that intend to build a high-level, real time multimedia processing environment, but it’s undeniable that some of the terminology used and concepts presented there are part of what I have to gather for my own work. How else could I know that Fnk will use an acyclic static dataflow programming structure?

On the theoretical side, one of my biggest references so far has been Miller Puckette’s free online book, The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music (Puckette being the guy who created Max/MSP and PureData, of course). Another obligatory reading has been Richard F. Moore’s Elements of Computer Music, although I have to admit much of it has been well over my rudimentary understanding of sound theory.

On the practical side, I’ve been looking for examples of what’s possible in Actionscript 3, so I can find out what’s actually possible inside the platform. André Michelle’s experiments with audio have been particularly interesting, having shown me that sound synthesis is possible at least to some degree (there are some caveats to Actionscript’s implementation of dynamically-generated sound, but also some experiments that show how it can still be done). This framework also looks promising and has a nice sample-based example to show what the guy wants to do. Something to look into in the future, specially if it goes Open Source (so it could be used inside Fnk).

As a further example of what’s possible inside Flash, check this music editor, mentioned on the previous link.

Within Fnk, audio synthesis support will probably be something pretty low level, allowing people to create waves and such and tweaking their properties. Again, it won’t try to be anything like this, but it’ll try to create some tools that make a bit of that possible by giving people the modules to create some complex systems (as long as they understand what they’re doing).