Jamming with Plunderphonics: Interactive concatenative synthesis of music

This paper proposes to use the techniques of Concatenative Sound Synthesis in the context of real-time Music Interaction. We describe a system that generates an audio track by concatenating audio segments extracted from pre-existing musical files. The track can be controlled in real-time by specifying high-level properties (or constraints) holding on metadata about the audio segments. A constraint-satisfaction mechanism, based on local search, selects audio segments that best match those constraints at any time. We describe the real-time aspects of the system, notably the asynchronous adding/removing of constraints, and report on several constraints and controllers designed for the system. We illustrate the system with several application examples, notably a virtual drummer able to interact with a human musician in real-time.