Note: λ was my undergraduate honors project. I haven't touched it since I graduated in 2001, and I don't really have any intention of picking it up again. You are welcome to resume development if you like (it's GPL-licensed). I have preserved the info page below as it was in mid-2001, with the exception of removing dead links.
Lambda is a tool for sound processing. It allows the user to manipulate streams of sound, whether they are generated from scratch within the program or taken from an external source. All the actual work is done by a collection of independent subprograms. Lambda provides facilities for these subprograms to send sound streams and control information between each other, so while independent they work as a coherent system. Lambda is (mostly) abstracted from any particular music system; only a small part is concerned with music while most of it deals only with raw sound.
The goal is to make Lambda a professional quality sound processing system which is robust, portable, inexpensive, and flexible. It is intended to be useful on standard midrange personal computers yet scalable up to powerful sound workstations with specialized hardware.
Lambda was started as Reid's undergraduate honors project at Macalester College and earned him departmental honors. The paper itself is available here in Postscript and PDF.
You can also snarf the latest version of the source code: lambda-1.0dev3.tar.gz. Be warned that this is still a development version.
There is a bug database [dead link removed].