#lutherie – Vincent Goudard

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]