[chuck-users] audio source in linux

Apologies if I sound bloody ignorant in this: I gather that most linux-based audio programming systems would be playing with some basic interface provided by the system. I wonder for instance if some basic sounds can be produced using the shell or some kind of very rudimentary program that instructs the sound card to, say, produce a square or sine wave. As it is a stream of numbers, I wonder what is that underlying process which converts it to sound? If I'm not wrong, both pure data and ChucK would be using this same underlying system in Linux. Can anyone elucidate with an example? I'm just trying to look beneath the surface here... ------- -.- 1/f ))) --. ------- ... http://www.algomantra.com