This first category could in fact be separated into two different ones: General Purpose Signal Processing Environments and General Purpose Multimedia Environments.
In the first subcategory we have environments that are designed to acknowledge any kind of input signal and offer convenient tools and constructions for processing them. In the second subcategory we have environments that instead of performing actual signal processing treat with multimedia objects such as video, images, or sound, offering tools to process them and to compose mixed multimedia scenes.
In any case we are not talking about environments specifically designed
for audio or music. And although the environments presented in this
section are able to treat with these signals and objects the reason
for having included them here is a different one: the approach they
represent and techniques they include are very relevant for the more
focused environments and particularly for our CLAM framework to be
presented in next chapter.