ACRE stands for Audio Composition Research Environment. It is a Windows application for realtime research in and composition of audio and music. The program takes an idiosyncratic approach to sound composition: it does not try to be all things to all people.

The software fulfills some of the promises made in a previous software system called Orpheus.

The user of the software will use ACRE to develop sound and musical "models". Each such model is buttressed by a collection of objects and scripts for defining the structure of the interaction of those objects.

The target user is a composer or audio design investigator. They would use ACRE for designing sounds and musical patterns for use in music composition projects. Once a composer or investigator has finished designing and testing audio/musical objects and processes, s/he can perform compositions, or parts of. The results of an execution will either play out through the sound card (and thereafter onto an audio recording device) or to a sound file (a .wav file) for further processing and mixing.

The ACRE development team is currently composed of four students from the MFC class and Michael Hamman. Each of us were assigned to work on a separate component, and were merged into the final program. It's still in the development stage, and we've made significant progress.

Our work breaks down as follows: