Roland Cahen

Plumage: design d'une interface 3D pour le parcours d'échantillons sonores granularisés

Plumage is an interface for interactive 3D audio/graphic scene browsing and design. The interface relies on the notion of tape heads in a sonic and graphic 3D space made of feathers associated with sound micro-samples. The spatial layout of the feathers is defined by sound parameters of the associated samples. The musical play is the outcome of a continuous and interactive navigation in the sound space controlled by direct manipulation of tape head trajectories. This work is based on the design of interactions. A simple and efficient audio graphic navigation is designed through the combination and synchronization of elementer sound object triggerings.

Sound navigation in PHASE installation: producing music as performing a game using haptic feedback

Sound Navigation consists in browsing through different sound objects and sound generators situated within a virtual world including virtual spatialized sound and visual scenes, to perform a musical trajectory and composition. In the PHASE Project installation, the 3D virtual world resembles the surface of a vinyl disk, magnified so that one can see the groove and move a “needle” (the “reading head”) in it and out of it to read the disk. Another such “needle” (the “writing head”) can “write” music in the groove. A part of the game is a pursuit between the writing head and the reading head handled by the player. Different musical devices have been implemented. Most of them have a haptic behavior. The scenario is fully related to the musical metaphor and aims to give equivalent pleasure to contemplative as well as to competitive players.

Dirty tangible interfaces: expressive control of computers with true grit

Dirty Tangible Interfaces (DIRTI) are a new concept in interface design that forgoes the dogma of repeatability in favor of a richer and more complex experience, constantly evolving, never reversible, and infinitely modifiable. We built a prototype interface realizing the DIRTI principles based on low-cost commodity hardware and kitchenware: A video camera tracks a granular or liquid interaction material placed in a glass dish. The 3D relief estimated from the images, and the dynamic changes applied to it by the user(s), are used to control two applications: For 3D scene authoring, the relief is directly translated into a terrain, allowing fast and intuitive map editing. For expressive audio-graphic music performance, both the relief and real-time changes are interpreted as activation profiles to drive corpus-based concatenative sound synthesis, allowing one or more musicians to mold sonic landscapes and to plow through them in an inherently collaborative, expressive, and dynamic experience.

Spatial audio: graphic modeling for X3D

In audio-graphic scenes, visual and audio modalities are synchronized in time and space, and their behaviour is determined by a common process. We present here a novel way of modeling audio-graphic content for interactive 3D scenes with the concept of sound processes and their activation through 2D or 3D profiles. Many 3D applications today support both graphical and audio effects to provide a more realistic user experience; however a common model and interchange format for interactive audio-graphic scenes is still lacking. X3D is one of the most promising formats for 3D scene representation. It is extensible and supports simple spatial audio representation and almost all basic and advanced 3D computer graphics techniques. We therefore propose an extension of the X3D standard to represent the sound process and activation profile model for providing a rich audio-graphic description in X3D.