JuggLing-a-Ding: Design and Development of a Musical Juggling Toolkit

Léo Kulinski; Wendy E. Mackay; Michel Beaudouin-Lafon; Nicolas M. Thiéry

Image credit: Léo Kulinski; Wendy E. Mackay; Michel Beaudouin-Lafon; Nicolas M. Thiéry

• oral
• Paper PDF link
• Presence: in person
• Duration: 16
• Type: long
• Session: Musical Objects

Abstract:

The musical juggling artist Vincent de Lavenère has spent a decade exploring the possibilities and challenges of a novel musical instrument composed of acoustic musical juggling balls that each play a note when caught. We first report on results from an initial user study that identifies specific needs and requirements for musical juggling. We then introduce a notation system for musical juggling performances, together with JuggLing-a-Ding, a web component for prototyping interactive tools that support the different phases of artistic creation. We next describe a modular pipeline that begins with a musical juggling performance specification, computes event-based and physical models, and renders them in 3D. We then explain how our implementation leverages multiple web technologies for ease of deployment and integration into a rich ecosystem of components, devices and platforms, including VR. Finally, we discuss future plans for interactive tools and studies with artists that build on JuggLing-a-Ding.