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MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, it’s a protocol of communication between musical devices. A controller is hardware or software that generates and sends MIDI data to the computer to control different parameters of your TouchDesigner. Besides audio control, it is also commonly used in live lighting or visual control. MIDI has become a really easy to use general communication protocol in media environments.
Click here to get more information on the use of midi controllers in Touch Designer.
Touch Designer has standard settings to retrieve data from a midi controller, for example the Korg nanoKontrol. And the Touch Designer community has contributed some nice examples on this one (by KAZAMA KAZUKI). The download "New TouchDesigner nanoKONTROL2 MIDI Mapping" gives you a fully mapped version that cen be controlled without connecting the hardware.
Novation Launchkey Mini MK3: The Novation Launchkey Mini Mk3 is an portable USB/MIDI controller keyboard including knobs, drum pads and extensive Ableton Live control. The knobs and drumpads send data that can be retrieved in Touch Designer. The setup of the midi controller is a good approach to understand what kinds of data MIDI can contain and how the protocol works.
The screenshots above show the four major screens we need top complete the setup.
All parameters are made in the Midi device mapper, accessible through the "Settings" menu of touch Designer. We will create a new midi device and map the midi values of sliders and buttons inside the newly created settings. Mapping buttons and sliders means filling in codes based on the log screen at the same window (be sure this setting is selected).
Download the example:
The "Touch Designer example: receiving midi data project" can be dowloaded here.
A short resume of the tutorial file:
In order to use this example you will need to plug in your midi controller with your computer with a USB cable. During class you will have the possibility to do tests with the Novation Mini Launchkey. This file contains a Touch Designer file with the mapping of the Novation Mini Launchkey. Copy this file into your documents folder and copy/paste the network from the videoswitch exercise into the example. The "midiinmap1" is the Chop that will show all the data from the midi device. This data can be linked to parameters of the tops from the videoswitch exercise (for instance to an effect like the blur, level or displace parameters).
