Francesco Bianchi e Carlo Barbagallo | mEiG system
The mEiG system (multimedia Event interactive Generator) project was developed by Francesco Bianchi and Carlo Barbagallo with the support of Tempo Reale within the research grants for music informatics.
mEiG (multimedia Event interactive Generator) is a control system for design, rehearse and perform artistic multimedia performances in a network environment.
The first step is the definition of Groups of Devices involved in the project and their features: Parameters and i/o configuration.
In an editable timeline is possible to place different kinds of graphical entities that represent different behaviors of parameters’ programming.
Static and immediate changes of the values of the parameters are stored in Presets. Moreover, here a set of matrixes can be edited to set the interaction between the devices in terms of input/output connections, parameters linking, and network routing.
Dynamic time-related automations are grouped in Events. Inside a single event, it’s possible to write automation of parameters belonging to different devices, allowing to focus on a multi-device polyphonic approach to design multimedia performances.
Time-measured Automations of parameters can be anything as functions, lists of numbers or text string; any value is graphically visualized in the timeline.
The main timeline can also be divided into sections through Markers. Sections between markers and events can be viewed as individual timelines, allowing a partial and focused editing.
Any of these entities in the timeline (presets, events, automations, and sections defined by markers) can be listed autonomously into cue-lists, allowing a non-linear, partial, and user-triggered approach to the playback of the performance designed with mEiG, even if it remains possible to perform the main timeline as a conventional score from start to end or sequencing a customized cue-list.
Playback is formatted into OSC messages and routed to different machines or physical devices into the network environment. But mEiG will be a distributed and shared system, not only on the playing side but on the editing side too: users connected to the system will collaborate in real-time to the design of the multimedia project.
The actual version of mEiG involved various client-server based technologies hosted in a Max8 (Cycling74) patch: the server is implemented inside ‘node.script’ while the client is a series of javascript/html components loaded in ‘jweb’ objects; data are stored in JSON format in a series of Max dictionaries while the editing timeline is a customized ‘bach.roll’ of the bach: automated composers’ helper library.
