Ixi Software: Open controllers for Open Source audio Software

Sound has been liberated. The 20th century freed music from various compositional constraints and ideologies, and during the last decade we have witnessed a transformation in the way sound is organized in terms of composition, production, distribution and consumption. This paper is concerned with the production part of this complex structure and will describe some of the ideas, experiments and conclusions of ixi software over the last years. ixi has been building open interfaces to be used with open source audio programming environments. We will go through which cultural and technological changes have affected our work and describe the situation of audio programming as it appears to us today, as inventors of virtual screen-based instruments.