Surfing the Waves : Live Audio Mosaicing of an Electric Bass Performance as a Corpus Browsing Interface

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, and Diemo Schwarz

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

  • Year: 2010
  • Location: Sydney, Australia
  • Pages: 447–450
  • Keywords: laptop improvisation, corpus-based concatenative synthesis, haptic interface, multi-dimensional mapping, audio mosaic
  • DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1177913 (Link to paper)
  • PDF link

Abstract:

In this paper, the authors describe how they use an electric bass as a subtle, expressive and intuitive interface to browse the rich sample bank available to most laptop owners. This is achieved by audio mosaicing of the live bass performance audio, through corpus-based concatenative synthesis (CBCS) techniques, allowing a mapping of the multi-dimensional expressivity of the performance onto foreign audio material, thus recycling the virtuosity acquired on the electric instrument with a trivial learning curve. This design hypothesis is contextualised and assessed within the Sandbox#n series of bass+laptop meta-instruments, and the authors describe technical means of the implementation through the use of the open-source CataRT CBCS system adapted for live mosaicing. They also discuss their encouraging early results and provide a list of further explorations to be made with that rich new interface.

Citation:

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, and Diemo Schwarz. 2010. Surfing the Waves : Live Audio Mosaicing of an Electric Bass Performance as a Corpus Browsing Interface. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1177913

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Tremblay2010,
 abstract = {In this paper, the authors describe how they use an electric bass as a subtle, expressive and intuitive interface to browse the rich sample bank available to most laptop owners. This is achieved by audio mosaicing of the live bass performance audio, through corpus-based concatenative synthesis (CBCS) techniques, allowing a mapping of the multi-dimensional expressivity of the performance onto foreign audio material, thus recycling the virtuosity acquired on the electric instrument with a trivial learning curve. This design hypothesis is contextualised and assessed within the Sandbox#n series of bass+laptop meta-instruments, and the authors describe technical means of the implementation through the use of the open-source CataRT CBCS system adapted for live mosaicing. They also discuss their encouraging early results and provide a list of further explorations to be made with that rich new interface.},
 address = {Sydney, Australia},
 author = {Tremblay, Pierre Alexandre and Schwarz, Diemo},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1177913},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 keywords = {laptop improvisation, corpus-based concatenative synthesis, haptic interface, multi-dimensional mapping, audio mosaic},
 pages = {447--450},
 title = {Surfing the Waves : Live Audio Mosaicing of an Electric Bass Performance as a Corpus Browsing Interface},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2010/nime2010_447.pdf},
 year = {2010}
}