Digital instrument pioneer Laetitia Sonami has been using Wekinator in her Spring Spyre instrument since 2012. Audio pickups attached to the three springs act as gesture sensors; these audio signals are filtered in Max/MSP using five biquad filters with different centre frequencies, and the instantaneous amplitude of each filter output are sent to Wekinator as the features capturing the springs’ current states. Wekinator’s outputs are sent back to Max/MSP to control sound synthesis. Sonamia also uses a modified controller with 16 faders and buttons to control aspects of the sound synthesis as well as to change which of the spring filter outputs will currently be used in Wekinator’s model computations (see Fiebrink and Sonami 2020 for more details on the instrument construction and use). Sonami uses Spring Spyre to play a variety of pieces, each one employing different models.

In this video, Laetitia Sonami plays Spring Spyre in a collaborative performance with Zeena Parkins.

In this video of our NIME 2020 presentation, I talk with Laetitia about her use of Wekinator in Spring Spyre and about what we’ve both learned through our years of working together.