ISO/JTC 1/SC 29 WG 11 N2203SA
Date: 1998-05-15
ISO/IEC FCD 14496-3 Subpart 5
ISO/JTC 1/SC 29/WG11
Secretariat: Narumi Hirose

There are five major elements to the Structured Audio toolset:
1. The Structured Audio Orchestra Language, or SAOL. SAOL is a digital-signal processing
language which allows for the description of arbitrary synthesis and control algorithms as
part of the content bitstream. The syntax and semantics of SAOL are standardised here in a
normative fashion.
2. The Structured Audio Score Language, or SASL. SASL is a simple score and control
language which is used in certain profiles (see Subclause 5.2 Profiles) to describe the
manner in which sound-generation algorithms described in SAOL are used to produce
sound.
3. The Structured Audio Sample Bank Format, or SASBF. The Sample Bank format allows for
the transmission of banks of audio samples to be used in wavetable synthesis and the
description of simple processing algorithms to use with them.
4. A normative scheduler description. The scheduler is the supervisory run-time element of the
Structured Audio decoding process. It maps structural sound control, specified in SASL or
MIDI, to real-time events dispatched using the normative sound-generation algorithms.
5. Normative reference to the MIDI standards, standardised externally by the MIDI
Manufacturers Association. MIDI is an alternate means of structural control which can be
used in conjunction with or instead of SASL. Although less powerful and flexible than
SASL, MIDI support in this standard provides important backward-compatibility with
existing content and authoring tools.