Res, a matter.

I just read a paper of friend and talented musician Jaime E Oliver “The Silent Drum Controller: A New Percussive Gestural Interface”, freely available here.
Jaime is a graduate music researcher at CRCA – Center for Research in Computing and Arts, California.

The paper describes the development of the Silent Drum Controller and contains some insightful points, so I took few notes while reading; they might sound obvious, but they helped me understanding better in which ways I could use biological sounds of human body in a musical performance:

• “…dissociate gesture with sound”
• control variables obtained through new gestural interface should be richer than what we can achieve with classical acoustic instruments
• acoustic instruments have direct correspondence between gesture and sound (richer vocabulary?)
• capture gestures to be utilized immediately sonically or store them for future sound transformations
• drive the score and produce changes in mapping
• discrete events can be obtained while controlling continuous events
• determine latency toleration boundaries in variable contexts and mapping systems

Take few minutes to watch this excerpts from a live performance (Performer, Composer: Jaime E Oliver). Personally I think it is one of the best sounding gestural interface at the moment.