# Nyquist

From Audacity Development Manual
Nyquist is a programming language for sound synthesis and analysis based on the Lisp programming language. It is an extension of the XLISP dialect of Lisp, and is named after Harry Nyquist. It can be used to write plugin effects for Audacity. The Nyquist programming language and interpreter were written by Roger Dannenberg at Carnegie Mellon University, with support from Yamaha Corporation and IBM.

## Contents

1. Nyquist Programming
2. Getting Started
3. Existing Nyquist plugins available for download
4. Advanced Nyquist

## Nyquist Programming

Nyquist was written by Roger B. Dannenberg and was intended to be used as a complete programming language for audio synthesis and analysis, with support for MIDI, audio recording and playback, file I/O, object-oriented programming, profiling, debugging and more.

Audacity uses a subset of Nyquist's functionality, allowing you to use Nyquist functions in Audacity. Audacity also provides additional features and commands for Nyquist, including the ability to create plugins.

## Getting Started

The following are a set of three linked tutorials to help get you started with programming in Nyquist for Audacity.

- The Nyquist Prompt tool
- Introduction to Nyquist and Lisp Programming
- Programming in Nyquist
- Creating Nyquist Plugins

## Existing Nyquist plugins available for download

- Effect plugins
- Generator plugins

## Advanced Nyquist

See: Creating your own Nyquist Plugins in the Audacity Support site.