FAUSTMapper: Facilitating Complex Mappings for Smart Musical Instruments

Smart Musical Instruments (SMIs) are digital instruments with key traits such as connectivity, leveraging sensors and the use of embedded intelligence in order to create new interactions between musicians, their instruments and audiences. Mappings are what define the connection between an instrument's inputs and outputs. Literature shows that complex mappings allow musicians to have high levels of control over their instrument, and that mappings also have a significant effect on an audience's perception of the instrument. Thus, creating complex mappings is a necessary next step when building effective SMIs. In this work, we present a set of lightweight bindings between FAUST and libmapper, two popular tools in the digital musical instruments space. We demonstrate how these bindings enable users to quickly create complex mappings between their own inputs and arbitrary FAUST synthesizers at run-time, allowing researchers and musicians to focus on the creation of mappings that best suit their individual requirements for SMIs.