Last week I was chatting with friend and colleague “Andrew Pask” about various things. While we were talking I mentioned that one of the potential subjects for future versions of Jamoma are time-based interfaces for our cuelist module.

He thought it was interesting, but expressed that he is basically fed up with all of these interfaces that express time as a linear progression on the x-axis, and furthermore that representation is nearly worthless for truely interactive compositions or performances. So we started brainstorming…

We both came up with what essentially the same idea expressed in different ways. An interface where the Z-axis represents the progression of time. In terms what the user sees at any given time, it is like a single frame of a movie. Each frame then would represent the state or algorithm representing the state of the relevant Max patches or Jamoma module. Progression through these frames (or interpolating between them would be analogous to stepping through cues in a cuelist.

So, instead of watching time going across – you watch it like a movie. In some ways this similar to the way Apple has chosen to represent time in their Time Machine for OS 10.5. It would particularly nice if you could quickly scroll through time by using the scroll-wheel on the mouse.

A brief snippet from the dialog:

Tim: so it would be like each frame represents a patcher algorithm, or a set of data laid out visually, and you progress through the frames with possible interpolation or crossfading from frame to frame

Andrew: yes – or you could specify the frame “resolution”

Tim: and frames could be triggered by events, or driven by a metro through time, remaining completly flexible

Andrew: events which exist in frames could have inspectors

Tim: that could be really interesting. It might be sorta like a poly~ object (but not really) that loaded up a bunch of patches and knew how to represent them in this visual doodad thing

Andrew: you could represent an audio file as a vumeter type thing

Another thought that I had is that if it is in 3D OpenGL, you could actually rotate your view of time to be on z-axis or x-axis or y-axis (or some angle where you see all 3 concurrently. Because one of the benefits of the traditional x-axis is that it’s easy to click on a random location and be at that point in time immediately.

Being able to switch back and forth between different views would be important, because truely interactive music doesn’t represent well on a fixed x-axis whatsoever. But there are time when that is best.

Implementing this type of thing with Jamoma should be easier than without it. In Jamoma there is a well defined interface, and all modules communicate in a standardized way. This could also be implemented as an interface to the cuelist module, which means that the internal ‘events-engine’ is already done. It would still be an ambitious project and take some time to implement.

Of course this is just one possible alternative to the linear visualization of time on the x-axis. There must be more research about this topic. Before starting, perhaps we should figure out all the possible ways time could be represented (hah!). If you have any ideas, please leave a comment or send a note!