This project aims to enable the interoperability of sonic and musical creation, opening the path to new creative dimensions that couple writing for time and writing for interaction. Our motivations are reflected in the international efforts to bridge the current gap between compositional and performance aspects of existing tools for sonic creation. This gap is apparent in the categorization of tools for computer-assisted composition and real-time.
For a composer, performance-oriented tools (e.g. sound processing and synthesis, mixing, audio post-production) are often limited to the metaphors of production and sound-processing sources (notably oscillators, filters, and physical models). However, these metaphors should be included in a symbolic language like the final score, enabling real musical writing and favoring more powerful methods of representation, conceptualization, and communication.
Inversely, composition-oriented tools still struggle to take into account a new problem, that of interaction: a sound system corresponds more or less to a work that is closed and entirely specified in advance, but must interact in real-time with an environment. This is the case, for example, for interactive musical works, video games, sound decors, or for multimedia systems and installations.
Project Description
Our approach is based on a language vision: an interactive work is seen like a performer (in the computer sense) who must articulate locally synchronous low-level temporal streams (the audio signal) in a globally asynchronous event time (pertinent events for the composition process). The INEDIT project promotes a hybrid approach that enables cooperation among different tools and stylistic approaches at the heart of an environment that supports all the phases of the musical workflow, from composition to performance. New technologies must be developed to reach these goals: dedicated scheduler, mechanisms for cooperative coupling,
on-the-go compilation, as well as innovative visualizations and tangible interfaces that enable the specification and control in real-time of musical processes in a natural process for the creator and designer.
Project reference: ANR-2012-CORD-009-01.