In this article we present the real-time audio plug-in X-Micks, an audio processing application allowing for remixing and hybridization of two beat-synchronized audio streams, which provides user interaction based on the extraction and visual rendering of information from the two real-time audio streams. In the current version, the plug-in uses the beat grid information provided by the plug-in host and a real-time estimation of energy in chosen frequency bands to construct an interactive matrix representation allowing for intuitive and efficient user interaction based on familiar representations such as the sonogram and the step sequencer. After trying to formulate the constitutional qualities of a rising new generation of audio processing tools of which we claim X-Micks being an exemplary specimen, the article gives an overview over the application’s interface, functionalities and implementaion.

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The concatenative real-time sound synthesis system CataRT plays grains from a large corpus of segmented and descriptor-analysed sounds according to proximity to a target position in the descriptor space. This can be seen as a content-based extension to granular synthesis providing direct access to specific sound characteristics. CataRT is implemented in Max/MSP using the FTM library and an SQL database. Segmentation and MPEG-7 descriptors are loaded from SDIF files or generated on-the-fly. CataRT allows to explore the corpus interactively or via a target sequencer, to resynthesise an audio file or live input with the source sounds, or to experiment with expressive speech synthesis and gestural control.

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