Sample Orchestrator

The Sample Orchestrator project aims to produce new applications based on content management and manipulation of sample (isolated pre-recorded sounds) banks. Its production corresponds to the conjunction of two elements: the widespread availability of large sample banks on different supports (e.g. CD and DVD, online databases) but that present a limited number of applications (e.g. synthesizer samples); and recent scientific and technological developments in audio indexing methods and database management systems, making it possible to imagine new musical functions, calling on global methods of content-based management and manipulation of the entire corpus of available samples:

• Content-based management of the sample bank: automatic classification, search by similarity, concatenative synthesis based on high-level descriptions;
• Content-based audio processing (based on a previous analysis of characteristics of the processed signals): transposition, time-stretching, hybridization, morphing, etc. These processing functions can be divided in pre-processing functions that address the preparation of samples in the studio, and post-processing functions that intervene in real-time when the sound banks are used via a new generation instrumental sampler;
• Orchestration tool, integrated in the OpenMusic environment, which finds, based on models of musical knowledge (generally empirical for composers), the best combinations of sounds with a specific musical effect in mind (fusion/separation, re-orchestration from existing sounds, etc.).

Research activities on identified scientific and technological issues have been planned as a part of the project: description, indexing, automatic classification of musical and sound contents, content-based sound processing, musical knowledge engineering and its application for orchestration, software environments for real-time audio processing.

Project Details

Participants