Mosaïq

The Laboratoire Formes·Ondes (LFO) is a research-creation group in digital music based at the University of Montreal. Dominic Thibault, its co-director, is a practitioner-researcher whose work focuses on musical systems. In his musical production, he seeks to understand, offer, and direct the connections established between musicians, their environment, and their instruments during the musical creation process. The group’s projects are diverse and always oriented towards new technologies to mediate musical creation: augmented and invented instruments, custom software, musical pieces in innovative formats, and interactive sound installations. The group's most recent project is a concatenative synthesis system called Mosaïque. This project aligns directly with our research-creation concerns.

The research team comprises a community of composers and performers who develop tools and examine their impact on the musical production of this community. Young artists like Gabrielle Caux, Jean-Philippe Jullin, Zakary Colello, Sarah Lecompte-Bergeron, and Jordan Torres-Bussière work to bridge the gap between technology and personal creation. Collectively, we approach digital music from various perspectives: free musical improvisation allows us to validate the playability of our tools and instruments, composition formalizes the use of technology and crystallizes its possibilities, and performance tests their limits of virtuosity.

For the Mosaïque project, our research-creation objective is twofold: 1. to create a playing and composition environment with concatenative synthesis that is immersive and individual (through VR); and 2. to develop a performance environment for concatenative synthesis that is immersive and collective (such as a Satosphère dome).

Team

Researcher
Dominic Thibault

Research assistants
Mimi Allard
Mathieu Arseneault
Marie Anne Bérard
Gabriel·le Caux
Zakary Colello
Jean-Philippe Jullin
Gaël Moriceau
David Piazza
Jordan Torres-Bussière

Collaborators
Myriam Boucher
Jean-Michaël Lavoie
Mike Cassidy

Press kit

Un logiciel pour créer facilement de nouvelles musiques électroniques
Article de Virginie Soffer, publié le 9 août 2023 dans UdeM Nouvelles.
https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/article/2023/08/09/un-logiciel-pour-creer-facilement-de-nouvelles-musiques-electroniques/

Funding

OICRM, Soutien au développement stratégique de la recherche 2022-2023
Financement pour 1 an

FRQSC, Soutien à la recherche-création pour la relève professorale 2023-2024
Financement pour 3 années

Mosaïque

Immersive instrument for composition and performance with concatenative
synthesis

The aim of this research-creation project is to explore the musical creativity potential of a new sound-generation technique known as “concatenative corpus synthesis” (CCS). While the technique is well documented in the literature, its use remains limited in the digital music repertoire. The research team will investigate the most musically engaging means of controlling the aforementioned technique. The discoveries made in a musical context will be used to develop a digital music software program: Mosaïque. The tool will introduce new paradigms for controlling and playing concatenative synthesis. In turn, Mosaïque will enable the creation of new music based on these technological advances.

Concatenative synthesis is a relatively new sound sampling technique(Schwarz, 2006a). It consists in first creating a graphic distribution of a large collection of sound files, the “corpus”. This distribution highlights the timbral proximity of different sound samples(Tsiros, 2014) & (Schwarz et al., 2016). Sound files can then be played back by browsing the graphical representation of the corpus(Schwarz, 2007).

Fig 1. 3D mapping of a corpus created with Mosaïque

CatarT (Schwarz, 2006b) was the first concatenative synthesis software widely used in the field of digital music. A true pioneer, Schwarz (2012) was able to disseminate the creative potential of the technique in the digital environment for the design of new instruments and composition systems. Since then, we've seen a diversification of projects in computer music that make use of technology. It is proving to be a good tool for complementing the timbre of an acoustic instrument (Tremblay & Schwarz, 2010) and an original sound processing tool (Constanzo, 2012). The community is also developing multiple ways of controlling it: through computer vision (Comajuncosas et al., 2011), by hand gestures (Gossmann & Neupert, 2014), by drawing trajectories (Tsiros & Leplâtre, 2016), through a virtual reality device (Neupert, 2017). The expressive potential of concatenative synthesis in a compositional context is also explored. It can be used to produce rhythmic sequences (Ó Nuanáin et al., 2016), to develop improvisational environments (Einbond et al., 2016) & (Bradbury, 2017) and to construct soundscapes (Stine, 2019).

- Link to bibliography coming soon -