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

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}
}