On the playing of monodic pitch in digital music instruments

Vincent Goudard (1) , Hugues Genevois (1) , Lionel Feugère (2)

1 IJLRDA-LAM - Lutheries - Acoustique - Musique
2 Audio Acoustique

This paper addresses the issue of controlling monodic pitch in digital musical instruments (DMIs), with a focus on in- struments for which the pitch needs to be played with accu- racy. Indeed, in many cultures, music is based on discrete sets of ordered notes called scales, so the need to control pitch has a predominant role in acoustical instruments as well as in most of the DMIs. But the freedom of param- eter mapping allowed by computers, as well as the wide range of interfaces, opens a large variety of strategies to control pitch in the DMIs. Without pretending to be ex- haustive, our paper aims to draw up a general overview of this subject. It includes: 1) a review of interfaces to pro- duce discrete and/or continuous pitch 2) a review of DMI maker strategies to help the performer for controlling eas- ily and accurately the pitch 3) some developments from the authors concerning interfaces and mapping strategies for continuous pitch control 4) some comparisons with acous- tical instruments. At last, a Max/MSP patch -publically available- is provided to support the discussion by allow- ing the reader to test some of the pitch control strategies reviewed in this paper.

Mots clés: computer music; organology

Mots clés: informatique musicale; organologie

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]; Acoustique [physics.class-ph]; Son [cs.SD]; Musique, musicologie et arts de la scène

Vincent Goudard, Hugues Genevois, Lionel Feugère. On the playing of monodic pitch in digital music instruments. ICMC/SMC 2014, Sep 2014, Athènes, Greece. pp.1418. ⟨hal-01073240⟩