OSC

Open Sound Control (OSC) is a protocol for real-time communication in small messages, originally developed for electronic music but suitable to numerous other systems as well (leading to the nickname "Open Systems Control"). OSC poses itself as a more general alternative to MIDI with a trade-off of low interopability.

OSC messages consist of an address (a path like /foo/bar) and zero or more arguments, which can be integers, time tags, floats, strings, or blobs. OSC messages can also be sent in "bundles" to ensure that they arrive at the same time for the purposes of musically accurate timing.

The semantics of OSC messages are otherwise implementation dependent, and different devices and applications will interpret and send OSC data according to their own protocols. In this way, OSC is not really a protocol at all, but just a way to encode lists of data.