posted 19 March 2001 11:25            

quote:

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Originally posted by SSC:
In the dictionary it says 'to bring forth something undesireable' (Is that where 'demon spawn' comes from?)
In software, people usually use it to mean create a new thing to carry on separately from the old one (without the connotation of "undesireable"...more along the lines of 'the salmon come home to spawn'). I've heard it used as "spawn a process" or "spawn a browser". I don't know what it would mean in the context of random numbers.
(Isn't it also something that Vulcans do every 7 years?)

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Ok well I have asked around, and one person told me it has to do with random events that spawn more random events and so on. You control how it unfolds these spawned layers of random events. Also I found something about it on the Orpheus website (Software for Interactive Sound Synthesis and Computer-Assisted Composition)at http://www.shout.net/~mhamman/papers/Cimxii2.htm . Here it explains what its event spawning is. Within Orpheus, a composer can generate more-or-less traditional "playlists" of SoundObjects. A more compelling tool however is the EventSpawner. By defining an EventSpawner, a composer articulates the conditions for the unfolding of events in time by specifying the unfolding of data. An EventSpawner links three data structures: the SoundObject, a SequenceProducer, and a ProcessObject

From what I hear, this sounds fun and I would like to play with it.