MapLooper: Live-looping of distributed gesture-to-sound mappings

Christian Frisson, Mathias Bredholt, Joseph Malloch, and Marcelo M. Wanderley

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

This paper presents the development of MapLooper: a live-looping system for gesture-to-sound mappings. We first reviewed loop-based Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs). We then developed a connectivity infrastructure for wireless embedded musical instruments with distributed mapping and synchronization. We evaluated our infrastructure in the context of the real-time constraints of music performance. We measured a round-trip latency of 4.81 ms when mapping signals at 100 Hz with embedded libmapper and an average inter-onset delay of 3.03 ms for synchronizing with Ableton Link. On top of this infrastructure, we developed MapLooper: a live-looping tool with 2 example musical applications: a harp synthesizer with SuperCollider and embedded source-filter synthesis with FAUST on ESP32. Our system is based on a novel approach to mapping, extrapolating from using FIR and IIR filters on gestural data to using delay-lines as part of the mapping of DMIs. Our system features rhythmic time quantization and a flexible loop manipulation system for creative musical exploration. We open-source all of our components.

Citation

Christian Frisson, Mathias Bredholt, Joseph Malloch, and Marcelo M. Wanderley. 2021. MapLooper: Live-looping of distributed gesture-to-sound mappings. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.21428/92fbeb44.47175201

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{NIME21_11,
 abstract = {This paper presents the development of MapLooper: a live-looping system for gesture-to-sound mappings. We first reviewed loop-based Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs). We then developed a connectivity infrastructure for wireless embedded musical instruments with distributed mapping and synchronization. We evaluated our infrastructure in the context of the real-time constraints of music performance. We measured a round-trip latency of 4.81 ms when mapping signals at 100 Hz with embedded libmapper and an average inter-onset delay of 3.03 ms for synchronizing with Ableton Link. On top of this infrastructure, we developed MapLooper: a live-looping tool with 2 example musical applications: a harp synthesizer with SuperCollider and embedded source-filter synthesis with FAUST on ESP32. Our system is based on a novel approach to mapping, extrapolating from using FIR and IIR filters on gestural data to using delay-lines as part of the mapping of DMIs. Our system features rhythmic time quantization and a flexible loop manipulation system for creative musical exploration. We open-source all of our components.},
 address = {Shanghai, China},
 articleno = {11},
 author = {Frisson, Christian and Bredholt, Mathias and Malloch, Joseph and Wanderley, Marcelo M.},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.21428/92fbeb44.47175201},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 presentation-video = {https://youtu.be/9r0zDJA8qbs},
 title = {MapLooper: Live-looping of distributed gesture-to-sound mappings},
 url = {https://nime.pubpub.org/pub/2pqbusk7},
 year = {2021}
}