Pratical Evaluation of Synthesis Performance on the Beaglebone Black

The proliferation and easy access to a new breed of ARM-based single-board computers has promoted an increased usage of these platforms in the creation of self-contained Digital Music Instruments. These directly incorporate all of the necessary processing power for tasks such as sensor signal acquisition, control data processing and audio synthesis. They can also run full Linux operating systems, through which domain-specific languages for audio computing facilitate a low entry barrier for the community. In computer music the adoption of these computing platforms will naturally depend on their ability to withstand the demanding computing tasks associated to high-quality audio synthesis. In the context of computer music practice there are few reports about this quantification for practical purposes. This paper aims at presenting the results of performance tests of SuperCollider running on the BeagleBone Black, a popular mid-tier single-board computer, while performing commonly used audio synthesis techniques.