Haddad, D. D., & Paradiso, J. A. (2019). The World Wide Web in an Analog Patchbay. In NIME (pp. 407-410).

Abstract

The renaissance of modular synthesizers in this age of digital music making raises fundamental questions about the connection between electronic musicians and machines [15]. The concept of sound synthesis using symbolic representations of information, whether in the physical world or on the computer screen, presented new ways of thinking about electronic music composition in the past century [10]. Even when hidden from plain sight, this symbolic representation in music making does exist. For instance, a live coding improviser constructs a mental model of their composition while invoking their musical expression in front of an audience. On the other hand, communication has long influenced electronic music. In the age of telephony, operators would manually connect calls across lines using patch cords, similarly to how sonic artists today route signals on software and/or hardware synthesizers. This paper showcases the integration of modular synthesizers with the world wide web, as presented in a Eurorack module called the 20N02, while also demonstrating the concept of controlling the modular synthesizer from a read-eval-print-loop (REPL) environment embedded in the web browser. Moreover, this paper introduces an online patchbay that allows multiple modular synthesizers to broadcast signals to each other over the internet, or receive data from various sources that are also fed through the network, such as sensor data.