Problems and Prospects for Intimate Musical Control of Computers
This addresses the problem of creating intuitive and responsive musical interfaces for performers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing gestural control concepts.
The paper tackles the challenge of developing computer-based musical instruments for live performance, focusing on ease of use, low latency, and programmable gesture-music relationships, and presents custom controllers, a connectivity processor, and the Open Sound Control protocol applied in real performances.
In this paper we describe our efforts towards the development of live performance computer-based musical instrumentation. Our design criteria include initial ease of use coupled with a long term potential for virtuosity, minimal and low variance latency, and clear and simple strategies for programming the relationship between gesture and musical result. We present custom controllers and unique adaptations of standard gestural interfaces, a programmable connectivity processor, a communications protocol called Open Sound Control (OSC), and a variety of metaphors for musical control. We further describe applications of our technology to a variety of real musical performances and directions for future research.