ReMIDI

The Challenge

Unlike tranditional musical instruments, the core driver of most electronic setups, the laptop computer, is not ergonomic or designed to be operated without being looking at. Modern MIDI controllers, which translate performance input from more traditional-instrument-like hardware controllers into signals that the computer can interpret go a long way toward ameliorating this issue, but introduce yet an additional layer of setup, and control complexity into a critical performance situation, at times making the problem worse, rather than better. Also, to expose an adequate number of controls to drive an entire performance, it is quite common to see quite a few more than just a single hardware controller in play at any given time. Worse, because each song, or section is unique, the performance of it is likely to rely on controls that differ between these different parts of a live show. The unfortunate result of this that is seen all too often is a performer who devotes more attention to his or her laptop, than they do to the audience, lending the appearance that they are checking their email, or surfing the web, rather than commanding the attention of a room full of people, and performing for them. Really, it isn't that interesting to watch someone read their email on stage, when they rarely look up, or do so only briefly. ReMIDI aims to help correct this disconnect, and empower digital musicians to compellingly perform for their audiences.

Concept

ReMIDI is a system which allows the flexible real-time reconfiguration of a musician's hardware controllers with respect to the devices they control -- working equally well with virtual, or real-world hardware controllers. It is implemented as a virtual device, and works by centralizing, virtualizing, and automating the unique connections between hardware controllers and the devices being controlled. It allows the same musical input, to drive differing parts of a performance in different ways, with reconfiguration either happening automatically, or at the touch of a single button. This is a dramatic improvement over what would otherwise could be a manual adjustment of multiple controllers, potentially multiple times per song, all of which would steal the performer's attention from where it should be -- on sharing their performance with their audience.

Implementation

ReMIDI is a virtual device, implemented using custom-designed modular components. It lives and operates within a node-based music construction application called Reaktor, by Native Instruments (bearing a similarity to Max/MSP and other node-based, real-time processing/interface applications.)