Pure Data (or Pd) is a graphical programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for the creation of interaction computer music and Multimedia works. Though Puckette is the primary author of the software, Pd is an open source project and has a large developer base working on new extensions to the program. It is released under a license similar to the BSD license.

Pd is very similar in scope and design to Puckette s original Max program (developed while he was at IRCAM), and is to some degree interoperable with Max/MSP, the commercial successor to the Max language. Unlike the original version of Max, however, Pd was always designed to do control-rate and [audio] processing on the host Central processing unit, rather than offloading the synthesis and signal processing to a digital signal processor board (such as the Ariel ISPW which was used for Max/FTS). Pd influenced the underlying design of David Zicarelli s Max extensions to the Max language to do software audio processing.

Like Max, Pd has a modularity (programming) code base of externals or objects which are used as building blocks for programs written in the software, also known as a Dataflow language. This makes the program easily extensible through a public API, and encourages developers to add their own control and audio routines.

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