ipt_tilde

ipt~ is a Max/MSP external object for real-time classification of instrumental playing techniques.

This object loads and runs TorchScript (.ts) classification models, enabling low latency inference on CPU and MPS devices.

This project is related to nime2025 repository, where you can find the code used in our paper Introducing EG-IPT and ipt~: a novel electric guitar dataset and a new Max/MSP object for real-time classification of instrumental playing techniques presented during NIME 2025, and train a classification model for electric guitar playing techniques.

👉 Train your own playing techniques recognition model in following instructions from our ipt_recognition repository.

⚙️ Requirements

• macOS 10.13 or later
• Apple Silicon processor M1 or later (Note: this external doesn't work on Intel processors at the moment)
• Max 8.6 or later / Max 9.0.3 or later

💾 Installation

• Go to Releases and download the latest version of ipt~ (ipt_tilde.dmg)
• Copy the extracted ipt_tilde folder into the Packages folder in your Max folder (by default, this is ~/Documents/Max 9/Packages)
• You're done!

🎥 Demo Video

A demonstration video of ipt~ detecting in real-time Instrumental Playing Techniques from the EG-IPT dataset is available here.

🧠 About

This project is part of an ongoing research effort into the real-time recognition of instrumental playing techniques for interactive music systems. If you use this work in your paper, please consider citing the following:

@inproceedings{fiorini2025egipt,
  title={Introducing EG-IPT and ipt~: a novel electric guitar dataset and a new Max/MSP object for real-time classification of instrumental playing techniques},
  author={Fiorini, Marco and Brochec, Nicolas and Borg, Joakim and Pasini, Riccardo},
  booktitle={NIME 2025},
  year={2025},
  address={Canberra, Australia}
}

📚 Related Work

If you are interested in this topic, please check out our other papers:

• Brochec et al. (2025) - "Interactive Music Co-Creation with an Instrumental Technique-Aware System: A Case Study with Flute and Somax2"
• Fiorini and Brochec (2024) - "Guiding Co-Creative Musical Agents through Real-Time Flute Instrumental Playing Technique Recognition"
• Brochec et al. (2024) - "Microphone-based Data Augmentation for Automatic Recognition of Instrumental Playing Techniques"

💻 Build Instructions

• In a terminal, run the following commands:

git clone [email protected]:nbrochec/ipt_tilde.git --recurse-submodules
cd ipt_tilde
cmake -S . -B build DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --target ipt_tilde -j 8 --verbose

Note: The instructions above may trigger a CMake warning: static library kineto_LIBRARY-NOTFOUND not found. However, this does not appear to affect compilation or functionality. Using the pre-compiled binaries from PyTorch will avoid this warning, but as of version 2.4.1, their CPU performance is approximately 20x slower compared to the Anaconda-provided binaries.

• Copy the produced .mxo external inside ~/Documents/Max 9/Packages/ipt_tilde/externals/

📜 License and Fundings

This project is released under a CC-BY-NC-4.0 license.

This research is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) as part of the Raising Co-creativity in Cyber-Human Musicianship (REACH) Project directed by Gérard Assayag, under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (GA #883313). Funding support for this work was provided by a Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) scholarship to Nicolas Brochec.