Joseph Malloch

The T-Stick: from musical interface to musical instrument

This paper describes the T-Stick, a new family of digital musical instruments. It presents the motivation behind the project, hardware and software design, and presents insights gained through collaboration with performers who have collectively practised and performed with the T-Stick for hundreds of hours, and with composers who have written pieces for the instrument in the context of McGill Universitys Digital Orchestra project. Each of the T-Sticks is based on the same general structure and sensing platform, but each also differs from its siblings in size, weight, timbre and range.

A Network-Based Framework for Collaborative Development and Performance of Digital Musical Instruments

This paper describes the design and implementation of 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 OpenSound Control. Example implementations were constructed using several different programming languages and environments. A graphical user interface for dynamically creating, modifying, and destroying mappings between control data streams and synthesis parameters is also presented.

Gesture Control of Sound Spatialization for Live Musical Performance

This paper presents the development of methods for gesture control of sound spatialization. It provides a comparison of seven popular software spatialization systems from a control point of view, and examines human-factors issues relevant to gesture control. An effort is made to reconcile these two design- and parameter-spaces, and draw useful conclusions regarding likely successful mapping strategies. Lastly, examples are given using several different gesture-tracking and motion capture systems controlling various parameters of the spatialization system.

Libmapper: (a library for connecting things)

We present libmapper, a software library and protocol for providing network-enabled discovery and connectivity of real-time control signals. Today there is a trade-off present in the state of the art for music-related networking. At one extreme, we have many systems still using MIDI, an old and insufficient standard for specifying keyboard-oriented commands embedded in short, coded 3-byte messages, limiting modulation controls to a 7-bit range. At the other extreme we have Open Sound Control (OSC) [7], a flexible packet format that supports named data and a wide number of binary numerical representations, but lacks built-in semantic standards. The present work proposes a semantic layer built on OSC over multicast UDP/IP used to carry metadata about signals, which can specify peer-to-peer connectivity between nodes along with instructions for associated translation of data representations. The translation layer avoids the need for normalization or standardization of data representation while maintaining ease of use and providing a distributed, flexible approach to music networking. The goal is to provide a system for fast and dynamic experimentation during the mapping phase of instrument design.

Distributed tools for interactive design of heterogeneous signal networks

We introduce libmapper, an open source, cross-platform software library for flexibly connecting disparate interactive media control systems at run-time. This library implements a minimal, openly-documented protocol meant to replace and improve on existing schemes for connecting digital musical instruments and other interactive systems, bringing clarified, strong semantics to system messaging and description. We use automated discovery and message translation instead of imposed system-representation standards to approach “plug-and-play” usability without sacrificing design flexibility. System modularity is encouraged, and data are transported between peers without centralized servers.

Input Devices and Music Interaction

This chapter discusses some principles of digital musical instrument design in the context of different goals and constraints. It shows, through several examples, that a variety of conditions can motivate design choices for sensor interface and mapping, such as robustness and reliability, environmental constraints on sensor technology, or the desire for haptic feedback. Details of specific hardware and software choices for some DMI designs are discussed in this context.

Everybody to the power of one, for soprano T-stick

We present a live solo concert performance of an original piece of music - Everybody to the power of one - written for the soprano T-Stick digital musical instrument. Like other digital musical instruments, the T-Stick enables the reincorporation of performer gesture as the main source of control in computer-based music making. A brief description of the instrument development, gesture-sound mapping and performance practice is given, followed by an introduction to the compositional motivation and materials of the piece. Everybody to the power of one is the fourth musical composition created for the T-Stick by composer and performer D. Andrew Stewart.