Organizing Mass-Interaction Physical Models: the CORDIS-ANIMA Musical Instrumentarium

Practicing physical modeling leads to reconsider the relationship with the musical computer, at a conceptual and practical level. This calls for specific learning tools, which fully take into account the specificities of this activity and go further than the traditional concepts of libraries of models and tutorials used in computer music environments. This paper presents a framework, called the Instrumentarium, which addresses this issue in the context of the CORDIS-ANIMA physical modeling system. The Instrumentarium represents in a structured and general way the possibilities offered by the system, by specifying the concepts that define the internal organization of the models. We introduce a functional analysis of CORDISANIMA networks, which is based on the study of several hundreds of existing models. It may be extended to provide a general ontology of models built with other modeling systems.