Drawing Sounds to Play Drawings

Prof. Dr. Jônatas Manzolli
Márcio Saragiotto
Márcio de Oliveira Costa

Interdisciplinary Nucleus for Sound Studies (NICS)
University of Campinas (UNICAMP)
BRAZIL
(jonatas, sgiotto, marcio)@nics.unicamp.br

Abstract

Since 2000, we have been developed digital new musical instruments using interactive paradigm based on graphic interfaces and a relationship between musical gestures and drawings. This research came to a state of development in which we are using these new environments in real time performance situations. Technically our approach is based on a creative usage of the JAVA2 implementation with emphasis on the Java Sound package.These tools allowed us to construct interactive environments that are able to run in several platforms and OS. This gave us the opportunity of exploring these tools in several applications using the Internet. Among several applications we have created, this paper concentrates on the description of performances using the environment called Rabisco.

Rabisco can be described as an interactive music system; users can drive stream of MIDI data in real-time drawing simple sketches on the screen. It is also possible to create and to perform virtual pieces using the client-server architecture where each musician is responsible for one drawing.

Rabisco system is compost by a Pad, where the user can draw the "sound" he/she wants to listen to. Up to four different voices can be controlled by the program. Each of this voice has a set of musical parameters like tempo, rhythm and instrument type. In this paper we summarize the futures of Rabisco giving emphasis on its functionality related to the representation of real time music gestures using drawing and interfaces. We show how we correlated inputs from keyboards, robots and interactive gestures to Rabisco and how the music and the drawings are correlated. We presented, using images and video how three artworks were composed using Rabisco..