About This Issue

Abstract

In this issue’s first article, Roger Dannenberg presents new developments in his O2 software, which he refers to as “communications middleware for interactive music systems.” The software sends messages between machines, including over the Internet, or between processes or threads on a single machine. O2 has similarities to Matt Wright and Adrian Freed’s Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol but offers important additional functionality, as the article explains. Dannenberg’s research won the Best Paper award at the 2022 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC). That award entails publication of an extended version of the paper in Computer Music Journal, and his current article actually represents a thorough rewrite. Augmented instruments constitute an important category of interfaces for performing musicians. Whereas many types of interface require new performance techniques or simply emulate the interfaces of existing instruments, an augmented instrument actually incorporates a traditional musical instrument wholesale but extends it, perhaps by adding sensors to process the instrument’s sound. Such is the case with GuiaRT, an augmented nylon-string guitar described by Freire, Armondes, and Silva in this issue. The guitar uses a hexaphonic pickup to capture each string’s sound, which undergoes continuous audio analysis.