OpenSound Control: state of the art 2003
NIME '03 Proceedings of the 2003 conference on New interfaces for musical expression
Real-time human interaction with supervised learning algorithms for music composition and performance
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We present libmapper, a software library and protocol for providing network-enabled discovery and connectivity of real-time control signals. Today there is a trade-off present in the state of the art for music-related networking. At one extreme, we have many systems still using MIDI, an old and insufficient standard for specifying keyboard-oriented commands embedded in short, coded 3-byte messages, limiting modulation controls to a 7-bit range. At the other extreme we have Open Sound Control (OSC) [7], a flexible packet format that supports named data and a wide number of binary numerical representations, but lacks built-in semantic standards. The present work proposes a semantic layer built on OSC over multicast UDP/IP used to carry metadata about signals, which can specify peer-to-peer connectivity between nodes along with instructions for associated translation of data representations. The translation layer avoids the need for normalization or standardization of data representation while maintaining ease of use and providing a distributed, flexible approach to music networking. The goal is to provide a system for fast and dynamic experimentation during the mapping phase of instrument design.