Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME07), New York, NY, USA A Unified Toolkit for Accessing Human Interface Devices in Pure Data and Max/MSP Hans-Christoph Steiner David Merrill Olaf Matthes IDMI/Polytechnic University MIT Media Lab nullmedium Brooklyn, NY, USA Cambridge, MA, USA Greifswald, Germany
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT For an electronic musical instrument designer, easy ac- In this paper we discuss our progress on the HID toolkit, cess to gestural data (motion, pressure, buttonpresses, etc.) a collection of software modules for the Pure Data and and output capabilities (lights, force feedback) enables rapid Max/MSP programming environments that provide unified, prototyping of musical affordances and mapping strategies. user-friendly and cross-platform access to human interface Many HIDs are temporally and gesturally sensitive enough devices (HIDs) such as joysticks, digitizer tablets, and for musical performance, including gaming mice, certain joy- stomp-pads. These HIDs are ubiquitous, inexpensive and sticks, and most graphics tablets. Another factor that makes capable of sensing a wide range of human gesture, making many existing HIDs appealing for electronic music perfor- them appealing interfaces for interactive media control. mances is that they are relatively familiar objects (as com- However, it is difficult to utilize many of these devices for pared to custom electronic hardware), which can allow an custom-made applications, particularly for novices. The audience to more easily understand the connection between modules we discuss in this paper are [hidio] 1, which a performer’s actions and the resulting sonic output.