Audio apps have been the red-headed stepchildren of consumer operating systems since forever: the APIs aren't tuned towards latency, and they often stop providi

Audio apps have been the red-headed stepchildren of consumer operating systems since forever: the APIs aren't tuned towards latency, and they often stop providing functionality once "decode an MP3" works. And audio programming languages themselves have lingered in a research/prototyping/hobbyist zone for decades. CSound, one of the oldest examples, dates back to the 70's, but production hardware and software tends to ends up with funky embedded-code style toolchains because the higher level provisions aren't good enough for professional apps. That said I have seen a few games(indie scale projects) do something like run an instance of Pure Data rather than code up their own custom audio system. It's all a bit related to the difficulty of doing low-level, time-sensitive I/O in a computing world that has towers of abstraction. Graphics have been ushered up that abstraction path while audio is still living in the 90's, so you can see cool modern shader effects in your phone browser, but the same browser can't play Amiga tracker music without stuttering and popping. The attractive part of the SOUL pitch is in making the base tooling experience better, and then down the line using that to boost performance.