FAUSTMapper: Facilitating Complex Mappings for Smart Musical Instruments

Publication Details

This paper appeared at the 2023 International Symposium on the Internet of Sounds in Pisa, Italy.

We were proud to receive the Best Poster Award at the conference for this work, thanks to the selection committee for this acknowledgement.

Paper Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10335404

Summary

This paper presented an open-source binding between FAUST-based audio projects and libmapper, a library for connecting things. This work provides and overview of mappings for digital musical instrument design, a discussion of how mappings are critical for the future of Smart Musical Instruments (SMIs) and the Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT), and most importantly an open source tool used for the creation of mappings between musical things.

The tool works by providing automatic discovery of a FAUST project’s parameter space, initializing and managing libmapper signals for each parameter, and providing real-time synchronization of values across the map. Our bindings are available as an open-source project on GitHub at this link.

A brief video presentation & demo from the second annual libmapper workshop is available on YouTube.

Authors

Matthew Peachey and Joseph Malloch

Abstract

Smart Musical Instruments (SMIs) are digital instruments with key traits such as connectivity, leveraging sensors and embedded intelligence in order to create new interactions between musicians, their instruments and audiences. Mappings are what defines the connection between an instruments inputs and outputs. Literature shows that complex mappings allow musicians to have high levels of control over their instrument, and that mappings also have a significant effect on an audience’s perception of the instrument. Thus, creating complex mappings is a necessary next step when building effective SMIs. In this work, we present a set of lightweight bindings between FAUST and libmapper, two popular tools in the digital musical instruments space. We demonstrate how these bindings enable users to quickly create complex mappings between their own inputs and arbitrary FAUST synthesizers at run-time, allowing researchers and musicians to focus on the creation of mappings that best suit their individual requirements.

Poster

We presented this poster at the IS2 conference, and appreciate all the great feedback we received!