The congress on « New Interfaces for Musical Expression », NIME 2019, took place in Brazil in early June.

I presented a paper on Skini at this conference. The NIME conference started 20 years ago, and has the merit of bringing together individuals dealing with subjects as varied as technology, musicology, musical creation and the history of technology. It is therefore characterized by a rather exceptional open-mindedness. We will note for this session the importance of Deep Learing technologies, with a first Workshop organized by Charles Martin from the University of Oslo and the afternoon of June 6th dedicated to Artificial Intelligence. This still gives 1.5 days on the theme of AI for 4 days of conference/workshop.

Note that all NIME publications are free of charge.

Le congrès sur les « New Interfaces for Musical Expression », NIME 2019,  s’est déroulé au Brésil en début juin.

J’ai présenté un article sur Skini lors de cette conférence. La conférence NIME existe depuis 20 ans, elle a le mérite de regrouper des individus traitant de sujets aussi variés que la technologie, la musicologie, la création musicale ou l’histoire des technologies. Elle se caractérise donc par une ouverture d’esprit assez exceptionnelle. On notera pour cette session l’importance que prennent les technologies du Deep Learing, avec un premier Workshop organisé par Charles Martin de l’Université d’Oslo ainsi que l’après -midi du 6 juin consacrée à l’Intelligence Artificielle. Ce qui donne quand même 1,5 journée sur le thème de l’IA pour 4 jours de conférence/workshop.

Notons que toutes les publications NIME sont libres d’accès.

The Skini platform was used for about ten sessions, from November 2018 to May 2019, for the creation of a musical piece, by students from the Nucéra secondary school in Nice. The piece was premiered at the Nice Conservatory on May 24th. It is the first large-scale use of Skini in a pedagogical context.

La plateforme Skini a été utilisée pendant une dizaine de séances, de novembre 2018 à mai 2019, pour la création d’une pièce musicale, par des élèves du collège Nucéra à Nice. La pièce a été créée au conservatoire de Nice le 24 mai. Il s’agit de la première utilisation d’envergure de Skini dans un contexte pédagogique.

The staging includes a calligraph (Frank Lalou), a soprano (Elodie Tisserand), and the public. Indeed, this show was probably one the first (maybe the first) show where the public was active in using smartphones to control the sound during two scenes, in a mode we call Massively Interactive Music (MIM).

The basic concept of MIM is to elaborate systems where the control of the scene is moved or partly moved from the actors, musicians, and even composer to the public. Massively means that the public can range from some individuals to hundreds of people. This asks several questions in terms of system, technical and musical architecture, human interface, programming and even sociology. The basic and static scheme of music production through composer, musician, spectator is disturbed. The level of possible interactions literally explodes. If we consider the actors implied in a basic MIM system we have at least: the individual, the public, the interactive system, the system controller and the sound system. These five levels bring !5 = 120 interactive paths. In case of a soloist in concert we have 2 paths of interaction (public-> soloist, soloist-> public), an orchestra with a chief bring !3 = 6 paths of interactions.

One goal of this show was to address the MIM concept with a first prototype of interactive system based on Hop and HipHop, which was able to control an Ableton Live set. The choice of Ableton for controlling the sounds was mainly due to the model of synchronized “clips” implemented in Live. This model largely used, not only in popular music, has the advantage of being quite simple to approach, and it benefits from a reliable implementation. This is nevertheless not the only model possible, and researches on MIM will certainly propose more complex paradigms.