Live tempo tracking

Questions
1

In heavily metrical collaborative performance, the is always for the computer musician/live coder to follow the tempo of an instrumental performer, rather than vice-versa. Has anyone managed to achieve this with SuperCollider, and how? Something that could track the tempo of an instrumental performer and share it over e.g. the link protocol would be awesome.

I’ve seen Nick Collins’s beat tracking stuff but not managed to get it to work in practice. I wouldn’t mind if it was a bit glitchy or took a while to converge, the tempo tracking could have its own behaviour and aesthetic of uncertainty to play with…

2

I imagine the usual approach would be for the live coder to define tempo preeminently… steady beat & heavy kick.

Restriction is tightly isolated, while connection is strengthened… the instrument player still free.

It’s almost a canidate for a timeless & universally accepted blueprint… DJ, beat, freestyle MC… coder, kick, open x instrument.

I’m interested in the process of description, & I’m sure it can come more into light, once someone answers your question…

3

Relatedly, is there an example of doing tap-tempo in SuperCollider?

4

I don’t know of existing code, but I’m implemented tap tempo UI’s a bunch of times before. This would make a nice quark.

Yeah, I tried for ages to get the Nick Collins beat tracking to work, but it couldn’t really accurately handle even basic 4-4 techno and besides that was crashy enough that I would never use it for a live setting anyway. Honestly, the Ableton Link support in SC is good enough that it might be best to find another Link capable thing that can beat sync, and then sync to that? I don’t know if this exists - I’ve paired SuperCollider with Traktor in a DJing context and it works quite well, but thats because Traktor is handling Link directly.

5

Yes agreed a tap tempo quark would be great.

I’m using Linux and don’t know of an available link-compatible tap tempo or beat/downbeat/tempo tracker here…