Gestural control in electronic music performance

Following a call for clear movement-sound relationships in motion-controlled digital musical instruments (DMIs), we developed a sound design concept and a DMI implementation with a focus on transparency through intuitive control metaphors. In order to benefit from the listener's and performer's natural understanding of physical processes around them, we use gestures with strong physical associations as control metaphors, which are then mapped to sound modules specifically designed to represent these associations sonically. The required motion data can be captured by any low-latency sensor device worn on the hand or wrist, that has an inertial measurement unit with six degrees of freedom. A dimension space analysis was applied on the current implementation in order to compare it to existing DMIs and illustrate its characteristics. In conclusion, our approach resulted in a DMI with strong results in transparency, intuitive control metaphors, and a coherent audio-visual link.