Gibber

Abstract

We describe design decisions informing the development of Gibber, an audiovisual programming environment for the browser. Our design comprises a consistent notation across modalities in addition to high-level abstractions affording intuitive declarations of multimodal mappings, unified timing constructs, and rapid, iterative reinvocations of constructors while preserving the state of audio and visual graphs.We discuss the features of our environment and the abstractions that enable them. We close by describing use cases, including live audiovisual performances and computer science education.

Discovering Creative Commons Sounds in Live Coding

“…However, access to online crowdsourced databases of sounds is less common. Gibber is one browser-based livecoding environment that allows the live coder to perform audio synthesis with oscillators, synthesisers, audio effects and samples, among others (Roberts, Wright and Kuchera-Morin 2015). Amid the different options for manipulating samples, it is possible to retrieve, load, play back and manipulate sounds by using the object Freesound (ibid.).…”

Preserving Hand-Drawn Qualities in Audiovisual Performance Through Sketch-Based Interaction

“…Live coders perform with symbolic programming systems that support live creation through terse syntax and close domain mapping between code and audiovisual output [21]. Live coding environments support on-the-fly programming activities that allow programmers to write and execute a program while it is running [23], and some environments support networked performance [7,24]. Strategies in live coding programming languages range from synchronizing events through a timing mechanism in the program flow [6]; representing musical patterns as functions from time to events [21]; and enabling performers to compose object-oriented digital instruments [25].…”

“…To illustrate this point, I compare Megafauna to two prominent symbolic live coding languages. In the audiovisual language Gibber, the creation of a simple drum pattern can be written by a = Drums( ′ xoxo ′ ), where the symbol x corresponds to a kick drum hit and the symbol o to a snare drum hit [7]. In ORCA, MIDI events are triggered by alphanumeric character methods that are organized along a two-dimensional grid.…”

“…In particular, there are parallels between abstract animation and the field of live coding: the performative creation of audiovisual works through computer programming [6]. Similar to abstract animators' use of manual drawing to generate both audio and visual effects, live coders use domain-specific programming languages that create interconnected audio and visual output [7]. Rather than rely on manual synchronization, however, live coders use computational mapping and automation to generate visual effects with audio data or audio effects with visual data.…”

Visual augmentation of source code editors: A systematic mapping study

“…Another type of tools utilizing the runtime source, live programming environments such as Impromptu HUD [15] and Gibber [32], display the augmentation in real time as the program is executing.…”