Hexagram-Concordia Centre for Research
Creation in Media Arts and Technologies

in collaboration with

Concordia University - Department of Music

Physically based synthetic instruments can produce expressive sounds, but need an expressive control system to reach their full potential. By mixing the truly physical and the virtually physical, we can create instruments that produce realistic sounds and have realistic controls, but that could only exist on the computer. We discuss the use of real-world controllers in the context of an interactive, touch-table based system for physically based sound models.

Controllers may be associated with individual attributes of models. Thus a dial might control the tension of a string or a slider its length, or an accelerometer might be used to shake a box around.

Audio-rate input, such as that from a microphone, presents especially interesting control possibilities. In our system, audio-rate input can be incorporated directly into the virtual world as force acting on some model. (This can be thought of, in a sense, as the inverse of the action of a standard pickup.) In this way we can create instruments such as the "blown string", which are physically sensible but could not exist in real life.

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