Phil Burk has had an amazing career as an audio developer: from writing DSP code on Z80, through creating a music language, writing code for mobile phones, PlayStation audio support, and Android, up to MIDI 2.0 contributions. He’s also a co-creator of the PortAudio library, which is one of the most popular OS-agnostic audio libraries (and it’s used not just from C/C++ but from Python as well).
He’s been there from the 80s up until today; he’s seen it all!
What I love about Phil is his purely interest-driven approach. He was able to make his hobby his work and thus live a life of passion. Even today, as a retiree, he still codes 8 hours a day just for fun.
After listening to this episode, you will not only learn a ton of useful audio programming knowledge and feel inspired, but you will also feel thankful that the world has audio developers such as Phil; they’re a real blessing, making our lives easier and more pleasant to the ear!
Episode Contents
From this episode, you will learn:
- how Phil created his first analog synth and started programming on Z80
- what challenges did early music programming face
- how HSML music programming language came to be
- the challenges of programming digital signal processors (DSPs) and designing audio hardware
- how mobile phone audio worked in the late 90s/early 2000s
- Phil’s awesome audio projects: PortAudio, JSyn, WebDrum, and more (see below)
- the story of MIDI 2.0
- how the Android team fixed the latency problem
- which languages Phil has used throughout these 4 decades of audio programming
- what are his work habits for maximum programmer productivity
This episode was recorded on February 4, 2026.
00:00:00 Podcast Intro
00:00:36 Introducing Phil Burk
00:02:13 Early Music & Homebrew Electronics
00:04:08 Building a Shoebox Synthesizer
00:07:18 Z80 Programming via Hex Keypad
00:10:15 Emulating a 68000 CPU on a Z80
00:14:08 Sponsor: JUCE
00:15:55 Phase-Locked Loops & the Commodore 64
00:18:41 From Biophysics to Programming
00:22:11 Meeting Larry Polansky at Mills College
00:26:02 HMSL: A Music Language Built in Forth
00:32:43 Motorola 56000: Real-Time Synthesis
00:35:30 3DO: First Software Synth Console
00:43:38 Designing a Custom DSP in Verilog
00:54:38 JSyn: Interactive Music in the Browser
01:02:00 Building PortAudio with Ross Bencina
01:05:52 Max Neuhaus Sound Installations
01:14:33 A 14KB MIDI Synth for Mobile Phones
01:27:02 Designing the MIDI 2.0 Standard
01:40:41 Sony PlayStation 3 Audio Libraries
01:44:44 AAudio: Fixing Android Audio Latency
01:53:16 Why Android Audio Lagged Behind iOS
02:03:08 Reviving HMSL with JUCE & PForth
02:07:07 Retirement: Kotlin, AI & New Projects
02:12:17 Every Language Phil Has Programmed In
02:18:42 Are Dedicated DSP Chips Still Needed?
02:20:43 Developer Setup & Favorite Tools
02:23:23 The Music-DSP List & Learning DSP
02:30:08 Just Enough, Just in Time Learning
02:33:05 Audio Is Harder Than People Think
02:36:26 Shower Debugging & Work Habits
02:41:40 How to Reach Phil Burk
02:42:50 Outro
