Alea · a home-made sound controller
Alea is a personal initiative intending to build a more tactile controller for live electronic music performance.
Why a physical interface to play live electronic music ? I was just fed up with the mouse and keyboard. Alea suggests to rehabilitate the gestures into electronic music and propose a direct and tactile interaction.
The player doesn't touch the ball, but simply influences its movements by tilting the table. This interaction introduces a latent and more subtile relationship between the player and sounds.
The movement of the ball is picked up in real-time with a camcorder connected to the computer.
The video is analysed through a "colortracking" tool (using Max/MSP + Jitter). It's then possible to get the ball's coordinates, direction and speed in order to assign specific samples or effects (on live input for example).
Alea uses a polar coordinates system rather than cartesian (xy), much more adapted to the ball’s movement and making programmation simpler, you just deal with the distance from the center and one angle.
You can draw your sound partition map on the table, assigning sounds or effects to specific zones with the software. The sound will be launched when the ball enters its zone. It’s possible to create sensible hand-made "unperfects" loops.
In a second time, after experimenting I was thinking of a possible evolution of Alea, making it closer to an actual product. A wide-lens and USB-powered webcam is integrated inside and is filming from under the table.
This solution fixes all the light variations issue I faced when experimenting with the first "prototype". It's also easier to use and to transport, the global size has been drastically reduced.
The bowl shape allow much more precise movement and controls than the previous springs in the corners.
→ in 2005 Alea was exhibited at "I live tomorrow" exhibition at Espace Landovski, near Paris
→ detail photos by veronique huyghe
→ special thanks to roland cahen, ensci 2005
creative commons license | some rights reserved ℘ david gauquelin, 2008.
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