fabian s. klinke
Open Sound Control (OSC)
Open Sound Control is a network protocol for sending structured, real-time control messages between computers, microcontrollers, and audio/visual software. It is widely used in interactive systems because it is lightweight, human-readable, and extensible (Wright & Freed, 1997).
Message anatomy
An OSC message typically contains:
- Port: UDP port on the receiver.
- Address: a path-like string (e.g.,
/pose/x). - Arguments: typed values (e.g., numbers, strings, arrays).
Example address patterns:
/pose/x/hand/left/index_tip/sensor/distance
Sending OSC messages in Python
Using python-osc, you can create a UDP client and send typed messages to an OSC receiver.
from pythonosc.udp_client import SimpleUDPClient
osc_client = SimpleUDPClient('127.0.0.1', 12345)
osc_client.send_message('/address', [1, 2, 3])
osc_client.send_message('/address/subaddress', 1)
osc_client.send_message('/address', 1.0)
osc_client.send_message('/address', 'Hello, World!')
references
Wright, M., & Freed, A. (1997). Open Sound Control: A New Protocol for Communicating with Sound Synthesizers. Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference. https://cnmat.berkeley.edu/publications/open_sound_control_new_protocol