This effort was suggested by Xavier Rodet of IRCAM. Discussions with
scholars and vendors at the 1995 ICMC confirmed the need for this standard
in the academic and commercial communities . Adrian Freed coined the name
and invited ICMC delegates to participate in the development work. Discussions
over the months led to new requirements for the standard particularly in
the area of internet applications. Also, although originally conceived of
as a portable (and not necessarily efficient) interchange format, CNMAT
and IRCAM have decided to use it as the primary working format for sound
analysis and synthesis tools. This has resulted in a standard grounded in
real needs and field tested.
CNMAT and IRCAM have been evolving and improving the standard. We presented
SDIF to the analysis/synthesis community at ICMC97 in Thessaloniki and found
widespread support and approval. Also at ICMC97, Xavier Serra, Jordi Bonada,
Perfecto Herrera, and Ramon Loureiro presented "Integrating complementary
spectral models in the design of a musical synthesizer," describing their use
of SDIF in the SMS project.
At ICMC98 we presented a poster on SDIF,
and met again with the analysis/synthesis community to discuss SDIF.
What's in a Name?
The "S" in SDIF now stands for "sound" rather than "spectral",
reflecting changes to make the format more general and able to represent sound
in non-spectral as well as spectral domains.
SDIF used to be called SDIFF (Interchange File Format). The word "file"
was removed because Internet applications demand sound descriptions as "streams".
The SDIF standard now addresses three contexts in which sound descriptions are
commonly used:
Files
Streams
Embedded in other objects
Example Sound Descriptions
STFT / phase vocoder
Sinusoidal tracks a la McAulay and Quatieri
Pseudo-harmonic sinusoidal tracks
Picked spectral peaks and their frequency/phase/amplitude estimates
