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Does a native OSC synth exist?
Is there such a thing as a virtual synth (on iOS or MacOS) that responds to OSC signals without translating to MIDI?
I'm working with a startup that is developing a gesture language for using augmented reality (HoloLens) to control lights on a movie set or for stage lighting and they want to incorporate music and sound control along with the lights. The system outputs OSC, the language of professional lighting. They prefer not to bridge with MIDI because OSC is so much more flexible and higher resolution. They've asked me to start figuring out the music side of it. I've always worked with MIDI, and use AUM and iOS music apps for my own music.
I'm familiar with TouchOSC, but as far as I know it's a controller only. I'm looking for something that receives OSC to generate sound.
I've done some searches and can't find anything. Maybe I'm asking the wrong questions. Any ideas if this is possible? Or is there some stupidly obvious solution I'm not seeing?
Thanks,
Steve
stevebowman.com
(If you're curious about the HoloLens light controller: circusbounce.com )
Comments
The upcoming Loopy Pro has native OSC support. It can control the parameters of synths’ exposed AU parameters without translating to MIDI.
If other hosts support OSC, they could do the same. I am not sure if there are any that do.
I'll check out Loopy Pro's OSC support. thanks for the tip.
Are there any synths exclusively on desktops or laptops that receive OSC to generate sounds?
Loopy's OSC support is not in the App Store version. It is in a beta version.
Interesting question. Never heard of any, other than ones you can assign parameters with.
But mind that there’s no standard way of expressing musicality with OSC, like there’s no ‘note on’ message unless you set up one for yourself.
I think your best bet would be modifying an open source synth, like Vital, to listen and respond to OSC. If you pursue this, you might have to come up with a new standard for expressing music in OSC. But then you could have some issues with latency…
(Edit: Vital isn’t open source)
You could use miRack, which also runs on desktops. It has the Holonic Source plugin that reads incoming OSC on port 9000 (in fact, you should check out the Holonist app, which is also used to control lights).
Polyphony is tough on miRack though.
Thank you for your suggestions. I'll see what I can find out. I do realize that we're pioneering new ground here and there will be hurdles. The whole Circus Bounce way of controlling lights is revolutionary, so we're used to it. We're really good at trial and error, two-steps forward one step back, which is the only way to find the ultimate, "obvious" solution.
The vision here is to merge sound production and lights not only in the same controller, but in the same gestures. I don't see yet how this could work like a keyboard with traditional notes, or if we even need to do that. It'll be more ambient-type sound washes and also triggering clips, DJ style. But controlled with hands and fingers waving in the air and picked up by the forward cameras of an AR headset.
Steve
I have a question, don't know much about OSC. I assume increased resolution is an advantage OSC has over standard Midi 1.0. Other than that, what's the problem with translating your sound-related OSC stuff to midi? Seems fairly simple to do, and really not much downside. One big upside is you have the wide world of midi software (including synths) that you can use, without restricting yourself to a tiny subset that support OSC natively.
How is the final-stage (just before sent to synth) translation of OSC to midi a problem with any of this vision?
Hes, your question makes a lot of sense. Of course that was my first suggestion. But the founders of Circus Bounce asked me to see if there's a way to preserve the high resolution and flexibility of OSC without squeezing it through MIDI. What I've learned just from this thread is that it isn't really possible now--that there are no OSC synths I can just download and use. So you guys answered my question. I'll report back with this info and suggest we first see how far we can go with MIDI before banging our heads against the wall to do pure OSC.
I don’t know if there are any synths but Reaper and REAlearn could be interesting for you. You still need to assign the controls by yourself.
https://www.helgoboss.org/projects/realearn/
Nothing to do with anything that this post is related to, but, I presume you’ve seen this at some stage
Loren Carpenter Experiment at SIGGRAPH '91
(Skip ahead to 1:17 to avoid the interminable Adam Curtis random burbling and video wallpaper)
https://www.are.na/block/1379735
Interesting experiment from 1991. One of our visions is an audience all wearing AR glasses that sense hand gestures (installed with Circus Bounce technology) and the sum of audience gestures deciding colors or sounds on stage, interacting with performers.
You might try taking a look at Usine Hollyhock, which is a DAW that (I think) integrates OSC pretty completely with its inner workings. I bought it a while ago and am just starting to get on with it, have no use for the OSC stuff but seems like it might provide a good environment for the project you're describing. The page linked below has a couple tutorial videos that show OSC being usable to directly control some of Usine's native effects, not sure if its native synth objects use just midi or both OSC and midi. Any third party synth plugins would of course be limited to whatever the plugin supports, i.e., just midi.
https://www.brainmodular.com/manuals/hh5/en/learn-usine/osc
I think I tried the free trial version I tried that was almost full featured, would be sufficient if you want to fool around with it.
I wish there were more apps which supported OSC on iOS. You could build it in Touchdesigner on desktop, that's the way I'd do it. There's better GPU support in Windows but it works on Mac too.
Usine Hollyhock looks to be what I'm looking for. Possibly a direct hit. Thanks hes. Just spending 20 minutes with the tutorials I see it makes using OSC for input AND output easy. Hollyhock 5, the latest (HH5) was designed to control multi-media lights, video, audio, which is exactly what we're doing. I'll dig in more and see if this is as good as I think it is.
The first video on this page, that focuses on linking OSC commands to internal controls, is fun to watch because in the last half the narrator demonstrates weird effects on his voice as he's narrating.
http://www.brainmodular.com/manuals/hh5/en/learn-usine/osc
There's also one for Max/MSP
https://github.com/felipetovarhenao/miniOMsynth/releases