This manual is a guide for users of Nyquist, a language for composition and sound synthesis. Nyquist grew out of a series of research projects, notably the languages Arctic and Canon. Along with Nyquist, these languages promote a functional style of programming and incorporate time into the language semantics.

Please help by noting any errors, omissions, or suggestions you may have. You can send your suggestions to [email protected] via email, or contact me by ordinary mail: Roger B. Dannenberg, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USA.

Nyquist is a successor to Fugue, a language originally implemented by Chris Fraley, and extended by George Polly and Roger Dannenberg. Peter Velikonja and Dean Rubine were early users, and they proved the value as well as discovered some early problems of the system. This led to Nyquist, a reimplementation of Fugue by Roger Dannenberg with help from Joe Newcomer and Cliff Mercer. Ning Hu ported Zheng (Geoffrey) Hua and Jim Beauchamp's piano synthesizer to Nyquist and also built NyqIDE, the Nyquist Integrated Development Environment for Windows. Dave Mowatt contributed the original version of NyquistIDE, the cross-platform interactive development environment. Dominic Mazzoni made a special version of Nyquist that runs within the Audacity audio editor, giving Nyquist a new interface and introducing Nyquist to many new users.

Many others have since contributed to Nyquist. Chris Tchou and Morgan Green worked on the Windows port. Eli Brandt contributed a number of filters and other synthesis functions. Pedro J. Morales, Eduardo Reck Miranda, Ann Lewis, and Erich Neuwirth have all contributed nyquist examples found in the demos folder of the Nyquist distribution. Philip Yam ported some synthesis functions from Perry Cook and Gary Scavone's STK to Nyquist. Pedro Morales ported many more STK instruments to Nyquist. Dave Borel wrote the Dolby Pro-Logic encoding library and Adam Hartman wrote stereo and spatialization effects. Stephen Mangiat wrote the MiniMoog emulator. Phil Light recorded the drum samples and wrote drum machine software. The Xmusic library, particularly the pattern specification, was inspired by Rick Taube's Common Music. The functions for generating probability distributions were implemented by Andreas Pfenning. John Chowning and Jorge Sastre contributed a SAL implementation of Chowning's voice synthesis technique. Chen Ziheng implemented the majority of the cmupv phase vocoder library used for Nyquist's phasevocoder and pv-pitch-time functions.

Starting with Version 3, Nyquist supports a version of SAL, providing an alternative to Lisp syntax. SAL was designed by Rick Taube, and the SAL implementation in Nyquist is based on Taube's original implementation as part of his Common Music system.

The current NyquistIDE includes contributions from many. Chris Yealy and Derek D'Souza implemented early versions of the envelope editor. Daren Makuck and Michael Rivera wrote the original equalizer editor. Priyanka Raghavan implemented the sound browser. Dmitry Portnoy wrote the original "UPIC" editor. Azarakhsh Keipour wrote the original extension manager.

Many others have made contributions, offered suggestions, and found bugs. If you were expecting to find your name here, I apologize for the omission, and please let me know.

I also wish to acknowledge support from CMU, Yamaha, and IBM for this work.