What is Sporth?

At first glance, Sporth is a stack-based programing language designed for audio. However, Sporth is really more of a text based modular synthesis environment, that uses a stack paradigm to build up patches. In addition to the language, Sporth has a very flexible API. It is very easy to build tools and software on top of Sporth. Sporth has been built to run inside of programs like ChucK, PD, and LMMS. It is also one of the main synthesis engines used inside of the iOS/macOS framework AudioKit.

Sporth was originally designed because writing music in C via Soundpipe was too tedious. The stack-based language design was chosen because it was easy to build a parser for it. After months of working with the language, it became very clear that Sporth could be more than just a prototyping tool, and that the stack-based paradigm lended itself quite well to audio DSP. Over the past years, Sporth has grown up into a very unique and rewarding composition environment.