Mapping tools for digital musical instruments

Participants:

• Joseph Malloch (RA)
• Stephen Sinclair (RA)
• Marcelo M. Wanderley (supervisor)

Funding: FQRSC (Digital Orchestra Project), NSERC / CCA (Gestural control of spatialization)

Project Type: Software development.

Period: April 2006 - Now

Status: ongoing.

The mapping tools provide a framework designed to aid collaborative development of a digital musical instrument mapping layer. The goal was to create a system that allows mapping between controller and sound parameters without requiring a high level of technical knowledge, and which needs minimal manual intervention for tasks such as configuring the network and assigning identifiers to devices. Ease of implementation was also considered, to encourage future developers of devices to adopt a compatible protocol.

System development included the design of a decentralized network for the management of peer-to-peer data connections using Open Sound Control. Example implementations were constructed using several different programming languages and environments. A graphical user interface for dynamically creating, modifying, and destroying mapping connections between control data streams and synthesis parameters was also constructed.

• Malloch, J., Sinclair, S., and M. M. Wanderley (2008). A network-based framework for collaborative development and performance of digital musical instruments. In R. Kronland-Martinet, S. Ystad, and K. Jensen (Eds.): CMMR 2007, - Proc. of Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval 2007 Conference, LNCS 4969. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, pp. 401–425, 2008.

• Malloch, J., Sinclair, S., and M. M. Wanderley (2007). From controller to sound: Tools for collaborative development of digital musical instruments. In Proceedings of the 2007 International Computer Music Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2007, pp. 65-72.

The Max/MSP implementation of the mapping tools is available on the software downloads page.