Understanding user-defined mapping design in mid-air musical performance

Brown, Dom; Nash, Chris; Mitchell, Tom

Abstract

© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to Association for Computing Machinery. Modern gestural interaction and motion capture technology is frequently incorporated into Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) to enable new methods of musical expression. A major topic of interest in this domain concerns how a performer's actions are linked to the production of sound. Some DMI developers choose to design these mapping strategies themselves, while others expose this design space to performers. This work explores the latter of these scenarios, studying the user-defined mapping strategies of a group of experienced mid-air musicians chosen from a rare community of DMI practitioners. Participants are asked to design mappings for a piece of music to determine what factors influence their choices. The findings reveal novice performers spend little time reviewing mapping choices, more time practising, and design mappings that adhere to musical metaphors. Experienced performers edit mappings continuously and focus on the ergonomics of their mapping designs.

Citation

Brown, D., Nash, C., & Mitchell, T. (2018). Understanding user-defined mapping design in mid-air musical performance. https://doi.org/10.1145/3212721.3212810

• Conference Name: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
• Conference Location: Genoa, Italy
• Start Date: Jun 28, 2018
• End Date: Jun 30, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Apr 19, 2018
• Publication Date: Jun 28, 2018
• Deposit Date: May 10, 2018
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• ISBN: 9781450365048
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3212721.3212810
• Keywords: digital musical instruments, mid-air interaction, mapping, user-defined interaction
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/865527
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3212721.3212810
• Additional Information: Title of Conference or Conference Proceedings : Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Movement Computing (MOCO 2018)