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Residency at SCRIME in Bordeaux

September 13, 2015

I’m currently enjoying a two week residency at SCRIME – Studio de Création et de Recherche en Informatique et Musique Electro-acoustique at Université de Bordeaux.

SCRIME and LaBRI are part of the French industrial research project OSSIA – Open Scenario System for Interactive Application, coordinated by GMEA in Albi. This project research and develop solutions for authoring of multimedia in interactive applications, such as stage productions, media installations, museum exhibitions, etc. The development and use of Jamoma is an integrated part of the project, with BEK as one of the international associated partners. Additionally a lot of research has gone into the development of i-score, an intermedia sequencer for scripting of interactive scenarios.

By the end of the residency I will have focused on four main tasks.

 

Changing how audio gain is described in Jamoma

Up until now we have used a custom MIDI range when describing audio gain values in Jamoma. This has been useful when interacting with sliders in onscreen interfaces, but has turned out to be suboptimal when dealing with scripts and mappings. Recently we decided that for the upcoming 1.0 release, we will instead use a [-96. dB, 12. dB] range. The refactoring started before I left for Bordeaux, but during the stay this task has been completed. This has been a geeky and dull task, but my recent experience will assisting Elin Vister and her installation “Røster – 3” proved once again how important it was to get this done.

 

Porting spatialisaiton models to 1.0

Most of the patchers that comes with the Jamoam distro has needed to be revamped for the upcoming release. We have fundamental changes to the names of externals as well as their functionality, mostly caused by the new support for model-view-controller separation. Many models are ported already, but the spatialisation models have been lagging behind. I’m making good progress on this currently. It’s not just a question of editing patchers, it is just as much a complete rethinking of the fundamental design of them. The good thing about this is that I can bring my experience with using them in numerous artistic projects to the table. Over the year there are certain issues that have been inconvenient, laborious or buggy, and now is the time to design the models so that we get a more convenient creative workflow.

I have started out with the DBAP= model, a model for distance-based amplitude panning. Above is a video demonstrating what it looks like currently. I believe this is coming along nicely.

 

Investigating i-score

Screen_shot_2015-09-13_at_22

Jamoma for Max helps structuring your patchers so that they don’t get out of control. Rather, even as your patchers grow large and complex, you remain in control of your parameters and their values, interfaces, initialisation, presets, cues and unfolding events.

i-score is a separate application that can inspect your patch in order to see what parameters exist, and then monitor and control them remotely. Instant changes and unfolding events can be expressed graphically and scripted in a timeline canvas that outlines what happens over time. This timeline is not rigid and fixed, each event can be triggered at will. This way you have similar flexibility in performance as e.g. a light console provides, and the unfolding of events can be organically adjusted and timed to the rest of the performance.

i-score 0.3 is still in an early phase of development but during the stay at SCRIME I have been able to start investigate the program, and also helped the development by reporting a few bugs and requests.

I am not sure if I am ready to use i-score extensively right away, but this is for me a long-term investigation, an initialising research that I want to follow up on over the next several months and years, so that i-score gradually can become more mature and useful to me.

 

Preparing for an upcoming installation

The coming days I will increasingly turn my focus towards working on material for an installation that will happen in a few weeks time. More on that later….