ReCoDIN [PhD]

ReCoDIN stands for “representation and control in the interactive design of digital musical instruments”, the topic of a doctoral research project started in 2016.

Abstract : Digital musical instruments appear as complex objects, being positioned in a continuum with the history of lutherie as well as marked with a strong disruption provoked by the digital technology and its consequences in terms of sonic possibilities, relations between gesture and sound, listening situations, reconfigurability of instruments and so on. This doctoral work tries to describe the characteristics originating from the integration of digital technology into musical instruments, drawing notably on a musicological reflection, on softwares and hardwares development, on musical practice, as well as a number of interactions with other musicians, instruments makers, composers and researchers.

This PhD was led under the joint supervision of Jean-Dominique Polack from the Lutherie-Acoustics-Music team at Institut ∂’Alembert (LAM, CNRS-UMR7190) and Pierre Couprie from the Research Institute in Musicology (IReMus, CNRS-UMR 8223).

Advisor : Hugues Genevois from the Lutherie-Acoustics-Music team at Institut ∂’Alembert (CNRS-UMR7190).

This research was supported by Collegium Musicæ at Sorbonne Université.

Tools

This research led to the development of various Open-Source tools and softwares, some of which are described in academic publications  (see below). Feel free to fork them on GitHub !

  • LAM-lib : a random collection of objets and utilities for digital luthery in Max.
  • ModularPolyphony (MP) : a protocol and set of abstractions in Max, allowing expressive control of polyphonic processes, connected in a modular way.
  • ModularPolyphony-TUI (MP-TUI) : a set of objects and utilities built on top of MP, meant for designing custom multitouch tangible user interfaces (TUI).
  • Sagrada : a library for audio-rate control of modular processes, particulary targeted at granular synthesis.
  • John, the Semi-Conductor : a web-based collective score generator, editor and player, crafted for helping collective free improvisation of electroacoustic music.
Related publications
  • V. Goudard, « Représentation et contrôle dans le design interactif des instruments de musique numériques », PhD thesis, 2020. [online]
  • V. Goudard, « Ephemeral instruments », in Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME’19), Porto-Alegre, Brésil, 2019, p. 349–354. [online]
  • V. Goudard, « John, the Semi-Conductor: A Tool for Comprovisation », in Proceedings of the International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation – TENOR’18, Montreal, Canada, 2018, p. 43–49. [online]
  • V. Goudard, « Ergonomics of touch-screen Interfaces », in Proceedings of the International Conference on Live Interfaces (ICLI’18), Porto, Portugal, 2018. [online]
  • V. Goudard et H. Genevois, « Mapping modulaire de processus polyphoniques », in Actes des Journées d’Informatique Musicale (JIM’17), 2017. [online]

Sagrada — Sample Accurate Granular Synthesis

 

Sagrada is an open-source Max package performing sample-accurate granular synthesis in a modular way. Grains can be triggered both synchronously and asynchronously. Each grain can have its own effects and eveloppes (for instance the first “attack” and last “release” grains of a grains stream).

You can get it from the Github repository:

https://github.com/vincentgoudard/Sagrada

Sagrada screenshot
sagrada.play~ will play grain synchronously or asynchronously (click for video demo)

Sagrada multilayers
sagrada.multilayer~ allows for running multiple streams of grains in parallel (click for video demo)

Sagrada was partly developed during my PhD at LAM. It was inspired by the very good GMU tools developped at GMEM (and its sample-rate triggering) and the FTM package developed at IRCAM (and its modularity). Not to mention all of Curtis Roads’ work on granular synthesis.

PANAM — accessible tools for digital art pedagogy

PANAM (Pédagogie artistique numérique accessible et multimodale) is a research and development project led by Puce Muse and concerned with the development and analysis of HCI strategies and tools for collective music practice with digital music instruments. It focuses on the accessibility of such tools for disabled people.

As part of the LAM team, several tools have been developed for the mapping, visualisation, and building of digital music instruments. They have been implemented as modules for the Meta-Mallette software (©PuceMuse), and are available as part of the LAM-lib, a software library for Max/MSP.

Publication

[pdf] Vincent Goudard, Hugues Genevois, Lionel Feugère. On the playing of monodic pitch in digital music instruments. Anastasia Georgaki and Giorgos Kouroupetroglou. ICMC/SMC 2014, Sep 2014, Athènes, Greece. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, pp.1418, 2014.

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