DawBi: A WebSocket-Based Plugin for Semantic Dialogue Between DAW and KOBI AI

Lately, the rise of AI generative systems has significantly influenced academic discourse on assisted composition, reshaping research agendas and scholarly practices. While generative tools can streamline exploratory workflows, they also automate key real-time choices, spectral shaping, rhythmic articulation, and gesture timing, thereby confining the composer’s reflective agency to the post-hoc evaluation of material that has already been generated.

In response to this issue, we present DawBi, a prototypical Max for Live plugin that opens a WebSocket-based, bidirectional dialogue between a composer’s Digital Audio Workstation and °’°KOBI, a web-based knowledge ecosystem that enhances creativity through semantic analysis and reflective feedback. Rather than generating music, the framework runs a real-time analytic loop: DawBi streams audio descriptors from the DAW to °’°KOBI, which hosts an annotated corpus of compositional works; °’°KOBI matches the incoming data to this corpus and returns the semantic tags of the closest musical pieces as a natural-language reply. The immediate link between evolving material and critically informed semantic descriptors prompts the composer to ques- tion, refine, and reposition the work in progress, sustaining reflective agency.

This continuous and asynchronous interaction between DawBi and °’°KOBI promotes a vision of assisted composition not as automatic substitution, but as reflective practice. Here, the system is not designed to produce music, but rather expands the critical, perceptual, and epistemic affordances of the compositional process, opening up new forms of co-creation at the intersection of art, code, and listening.

Web Audio Conference 2025 : jour 2