Section: New Results

BOEUF: A Unified Framework for Modeling and Designing Digital Orchestras

Florent Berthaut, Luke Dahl, Patricia Plénacoste

Orchestras of Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) enable new musical collaboration possibilities, extending those of acoustic and electric orchestras. However the creation and development of these orchestras remain constrained. In fact, each new musical collaboration system or orchestra piece relies on a fixed number of musicians, a fixed set of instruments (often only one), and a fixed subset of possible modes of collaboration. In this paper, we describe a unified framework that enables the design of Digital Orchestras with potentially different DMIs and an expand-able set of collaboration modes. It relies on research done on analysis and classification of traditional and digital orchestras, on research in Collaborative Virtual Environments, and on interviews of musicians and composers. The BOEUF framework consists of a classification of modes of collaboration and a set of components for modelling digital orchestras. Integrating this framework into DMIs will enable advanced musical collaboration modes to be used in any digital orchestra, including spontaneous jam sessions.

Current work on this project consists in the implementation of BOEUF in the PureData programming language and in the study of its impact on musical collaboration during short improvised jam sessions.