this script was written to support the creation of physically gathered together norns ensembles, providing players a way of “conducting” a performance in a non-hierarchical manner.
it occurred to me that a whole lot of music performance involves control. also, and somewhat conversely, there has been a lot of music concerned more with giving up control, particularly to a machine, such as with the development of generative music and instruments inspired by chaos (blippoo box and wing pinger, for example). this script is meant to promote a somewhat different approach, where a performance is built around performers in immediate physical proximity to one another, giving up control to each other.
using this mod, players gather together and connect their norns to the same network. then, one of the norns is selected by the players to act as a “host.” the norns in the ensemble are registered to this host. the host norns broadcasts each registration it receives with all the other devices. once registered, each norns will display the scripts the other norns have currently loaded and players can select parameters from the scripts to (semi)conduct. the parameters that appear in this mod may be controlled just as if the script was running on the norns locally.
the mod also includes macro features that allow multiple params on multiple norns to be mapped and controlled from a single macro param. these mappings can be saved for future performance sessions.
This is brilliant, and not to get too OT but I’ve been thinking all day of what scripts might map params to midi ccs? In other words could you use this mod to modulate other Norns’ connected hardware? And with what scripts?
i’m not sure which norns scripts support midi cc but i would start by looking through the scripts listed on norns.community that have been tagged with ‘midi’
Very cool. I realize it’s day 1 but I’m already thinking of how to use this outside its intended purpose. Looking at the code it appears the norns use osc to communicate with each other (or each with the host).
Am I correct that it would be theoretically possible for a geographically distributed group of nornsers to use this, provided that they opened their local firewalls to UDP traffic on port 10111?
I realize that they would not be able to hear the resulting sounds, but that could be interesting too. And latency could be an issue (or a feature) as well.
i imagine this is theoretically possible but then people wouldn’t meet each other in person while using the script if they were using it from different locations.
i will host a short workshop on saturday, june 10 at 10am pacific (1pm new york/6pm london) with @renegog to demo the semiconductor mod on jitsi:
i’d like to encourage folks who are interested in joining to find other norns owners nearby to join the meeting together. the mod also works with just a single norns so anyone joining by themselves will still be able to follow along.
hihi everyone! just wanted to post a reminder that we’ll have a short mini workshop tomorrow morning online (link above) at 10am pacific (1pm new york/6pm london) to go over the new semiconductor mod script.
And latency could be an issue (or a feature) as well.
