Mosaïque

Concatenative synthesis instrument for the practicing musicians

Immersive instrument for composition and performance with concatenative synthesis

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Mosaïque is a corpus-based concatenative synthesis software that offers an immersive graphical representation to creators who wish to manipulate sound within a virtual timbral space. Mosaïque takes the form of a collection of Max for Live instruments to play sound coming from the Ableton Live composition environment. In developing Mosaïque, we aim to provide greater accessibility to a sound generation technique that is relatively new and still not widely spread. The technique involves mapping thousands of short sound samples (the corpus) into a three-dimensional representation based on their timbral proximity; the similarity of sounds will correspond to their respective proximity to each other in the 3D space.

Max for Live instrument
collection

Audio Excerpts

Healing Frequencies Remix / Gabriel·le Caux

To create this sound clip, a single audio file was inserted into the tool. It is the electroacoustic piece Healing Frequencies previously composed by Gabriel·le Caux. Mosaïque then segmented the audio file into several samples distributed within a point cloud. The excerpt uses only the loop playback mode for the samples, taking advantage of the polyphony functions.

An interesting aspect is the ability to gradually transition from one group of sound loops to another, thus creating an organic evolution of the sonic result. The excerpt was improvised from start to finish and was not edited afterward.

Exploration of Percussion / Jordan Torres-Bussière

For this excerpt, Jordan loaded directly into Mosaïque a collection of sounds recorded in the studio by our team and percussionist Joseph Visseaux. These recordings consist of improvisations by the percussionist on bass drums, congas, snare drums, and bongos. They were extensively segmented by the tool to maintain perceptual coherence, specifically the relationship between the attack and decay portions of the percussion sounds. The tile cloud is explored to create drastic and frenetic mass changes.

Wind Dispersion et Bird Collection / Gabriel·le Caux

To create these sound excerpts, sound banks containing several audio files were inserted into the tool. The first excerpt includes recordings of wind, rain, and streams. The second excerpt is composed of various bird songs, frog sounds, and bat noises. These excerpts were created in one take and contain no post-production editing.

In the future, it will be possible to create more complex and intuitive soundscapes, which can be generated and controlled using automations and/or manipulated in real time. The sound sources could also be spatialized in a three-dimensional space.

Metallic Textures / Jordan Torres-Bussière

In this sound excerpt, a variety of recordings obtained from metallic objects were closely segmented. Smooth and textured sounds are generated by a high number of voices by calibrating the polyphony in Mosaïque. Since the sounds are grouped by timbral proximity in space, it was possible to alternate between noisy and tonal parts using the computer mouse.