Music105Final:Courtney

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[edit] Motivation

To lose control of the physical body during musical performance.

[edit] Description

I intend to build a small device that will be used for gestural controlling of different sound parameters for a particular piece of music. How the data from the controller is mapped to sound will be changed throughout the course of the piece. In the beginning, the mapping will be very transparent and it will be easy for the performer to affect change. However, the piece will go through several modes of increasingly more obscure mappings until the performer's gestures do not affect the piece at all. By "obscure" I mean that the gestures will have a less straight-forward way of affecting the processes that are creating/controlling sound from the computer. At each progressive stage, the performer will have to adapt and learn to use the current mapping. Relatively soon after the performer has lost all control, the piece will end.

[edit] Implementation

I plan to build a small wireless device with some sensors that can be strapped on to the composer's hand. Since the piece is about the body, I am trying to build something that will be relatively invisible. This device will interact with a performance system on my laptop that will handle the mappings and sound. I am already in the process of writing the performance system that will form the basis for this piece.

I'm thinking the small device will have an accelerometer and perhaps another sensor for physical location. It should be small and discreet.

The performance system will most likely consist of:

• rhythmic patterns within patterns
• some sort of mapping that involves manipulation of a coordinate space which will get translated into musical/sound space.
  • folding? (ie. reflection over a line)
  • manipulation of some topological space?
• accepting sound input into buffers and then manipulating and cutting up the output

This system is currently being written in C++ but this is still subject to change.