Reconciling continuous time and discrete event-based time in musical applications

slides

Some real-time applications require simultaneous use of several, and sometimes mismatching, temporal relationships. This is the case in musician-computer interactions where the time must be handled both through events and its continuous passage.

We will present approach developed in the Antescofo reactive and temporized language, where the programmer is able to define its own hybrid temporal coordinates for precise scheduling of electronic actions in complex synchronizations with the musicians. Several strategies are available to conciliate the passage of time (tempo during the performance) and the expected occurrence of events (score). We introduce the notion of time-time diagram to picture and to reason on the relationships between two hybrid time coordinates.