JuggLing-a-Ding: Design and Development of a Musical Juggling Toolkit

Léo Kulinski, Wendy E. Mackay, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, and Nicolas M. Thiéry

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

The musical juggling artist Vincent de Lavenère has spent a decade exploring the possibilities and challenges of a novel musical instrument composed of acoustic musical juggling balls that each play a note when caught. We first report on results from an initial user study that identifies specific needs and requirements for musical juggling. We then introduce a notation system for musical juggling performances, together with JuggLing-a-Ding, a web component for prototyping interactive tools that support the different phases of artistic creation. We next describe a modular pipeline that begins with a musical juggling performance specification, computes event-based and physical models, and renders them in 3D. We then explain how our implementation leverages multiple web technologies for ease of deployment and integration into a rich ecosystem of components, devices and platforms, including VR. Finally, we discuss future plans for interactive tools and studies with artists that build on JuggLing-a-Ding.

Citation

Léo Kulinski, Wendy E. Mackay, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, and Nicolas M. Thiéry. 2026. JuggLing-a-Ding: Design and Development of a Musical Juggling Toolkit. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20784236 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_76,
 abstract = {The musical juggling artist Vincent de Lavenère has spent a decade exploring the possibilities and challenges of a novel musical instrument composed of acoustic musical juggling balls that each play a note when caught. We first report on results from an initial user study that identifies specific needs and requirements for musical juggling. We then introduce a notation system for musical juggling performances, together with JuggLing-a-Ding, a web component for prototyping interactive tools that support the different phases of artistic creation. We next describe a modular pipeline that begins with a musical juggling performance specification, computes event-based and physical models, and renders them in 3D. We then explain how our implementation leverages multiple web technologies for ease of deployment and integration into a rich ecosystem of components, devices and platforms, including VR. Finally, we discuss future plans for interactive tools and studies with artists that build on JuggLing-a-Ding.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {76},
 author = {Léo Kulinski and Wendy E. Mackay and Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and Nicolas M. Thiéry},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20784236},
 editor = {Benedict Gaster and João Tragtenberg and Anna Xambó and Tom Mitchell},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {},
 numpages = {8},
 pages = {644--651},
 title = {JuggLing-a-Ding: Design and Development of a Musical Juggling Toolkit},
 track = {Paper},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_76.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}