Nuance: a Software Tool for Capturing Synchronous Data Streams from Multimodal Musical Systems

In this paper we describe Nuance, a software application for recording synchronous data streams from modern musical systems that involve audio and gesture signals. Nuance currently supports recording data from a number of input sources including real-time audio, and any sensor system, musical interface, or instrument which outputs serial, Open Sound Control (OSC), or MIDI. Nuance is unique in that it is a highly customizable to the user and unknown musical systems for music information retrieval (MIR), allowing virtually any multimodal input to be recorded with minimal effort. Targeted toward musicians working with MIR researchers, Nuance considerably minimizes the set-up and running times of MIR data acquisition scenarios. Nuance attempts to eliminate most of the software programming required to gather data from custom multimodal systems, and provides an easy dragand-drop user interface for setting up, configuring, and recording synchronous multimodal data streams.