Conference Schedule

Although MIDI is an adequate tool to serve terminal sinks with musical events, it is not the ideal choice as a primary transport layer for more complex and/or expressive event streams like e.g. multi-touch, gesture or motion based controller data. Open Sound Control (OSC) is a better candidate and generally more adaptable for such unconventional music controllers.
Once the OSC event stream arrives on our Linux box, we would like to be able to handle arbitrary events analogously to audio and MIDI streams, e.g. with low-latency, sample-accuracy and dynamic routing with the JACK audio connection kit. Currently, OSC bundles may be scheduled and carry a time stamp for future dispatch, intra-host routing of OSC messages via UDP/TCP sockets is non real-time and introduces unnecessary latency and each terminal OSC server eventually needs to relate OSC time stamps to JACK sample time which can introduce considerable jitter.
A least-effort approach is to inject and route raw OSC messages directly via JACK MIDI ports running on an unaltered, vanilla JACK server. From a users perspective, JACK MIDI (contrary to its naming) can be used as general-purpose stateless event system as it is indifferent to the form of transported events as long as they reside inside the JACK graph.
Sample-accurate, low-latency OSC routing via vanilla JACK thus enables us to design specialized event filter chains to map unconventional controller data to musical events or build smart translators to e.g. bridge between MIDI and OSC, for both of which we bring experimental implementations.

The Chimaera is a touch-less, expressive, polyphonic and electronic music controller based on magnetic field sensing. An array of linear hall-effect sensors and their vicinity make up a continuous two dimensional interaction space. The sensors are excited with Neodymium magnets worn on fingers. The device continuously tracks position and vicinity of multiple present magnets along the sensor array to produce event signals accordingly. It is a kind of mixed analog/digital offspring of the theremin and trautonium. These general-purpose event signals are transmitted via Open Sound Control to a Linux host running SuperCollider, translated into musical events and rendered to audio according to ever morphing mappings in respondence to the visitors input dynamics.
Visitors are not only free to interact with the instrument, they are also encouraged to hook up their own notebooks as NetJack2 slaves to intercept and process the original audio/MIDI/OSC data streams.