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

• Year: 2021
• Location: Shanghai, China
• Article Number: 11
• DOI: 10.21428/92fbeb44.47175201 (Link to paper)
• PDF link
• Presentation Video

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:

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}
}