Modality Toolkit

The Modality Toolkit is a library to facilitate accessing (hardware) controllers in SuperCollider. It is designed and developed by the ModalityTeam, a group of people that see themselves as both developers and (advanced) users of SuperCollider.

The central idea behind the Modality-toolkit is to simplify creation of individual (electronic) instruments with SuperCollider, using controllers of various kinds. To this end, a common code interface, MKtl, is used for connecting controllers from various sources (and protocols). These are atm. HID and MIDI; OSC, Serialport and GUI-based are planned to be integrated.

The name Modality arose from the idea to scaffold the creation of modal interfaces, i.e. to create interfaces where one physical controller can be used for different purposes and it is possible to switch its functionality, even at runtime. It is our believe that integration of such on-the-fly remapping features helps to create a setup much more flexible, powerful, and interesting to play. Such a modal interface allows to cope with fast changes of overall direction as it can be necessary when e.g. improvising with musicians playing acoustic instruments.

For more information, visit the Modality page.

Installation

There are multiple ways to install Modality to your SuperCollider environment:

• Quarks (recommended for generic installations of SC 3.7+)
• git clone (recommended for active development)
• manual zip-file (recommended for static standalone installations)

Quarks install

• evaluate Quarks.gui in SuperCollider
• select and install Modality-toolkit

git

• Evaluate Platform.userExtensionDir to get the path to the SuperCollider extension folder.
• Clone the modality toolkit to that folder via git clone https://github.com/ModalityTeam/Modality-toolkit.git Modality

manual zip-file

• download the zip file of the current repository head.
• Evaluate Platform.userExtensionDir to get the path to the SuperCollider extension folder.
• unzip the downloaded file into the extensions folder.

Getting started

Please read the article on "Modality" in the SuperCollider help system (Here's the unrendered version of it if you want to take a peek).

Acknowledgements

Modality and its research meetings have kindly been supported by BEK and STEIM. The Modality toolkit is free software published under the GPL.