Musical Multimodal Interaction: From Bodies to Ecologies

Musical performance can be thought of in multimodal terms - physical interaction with musical instruments produces sound output, often while the performer is visually reading a score. Digital Musical Instrument (DMI) design merges tenets of HCI and musical instrument practice. Audiovisual performance and other forms of multimedia might benefit from multimodal thinking. This keynote revisits two decades of interactive music practice that has paralleled the development of the field of multimodal interaction research. The BioMuse was an early digital musical instrument system using EMG muscle sensing that was extended by a second mode of sensing, allowing effort and position to be two complementary modalities [1]. The Haptic Wave applied principles of cross-modal information display to create a haptic audio editor enabling visually impaired audio producers to 'feel' audio waveforms they could not see in a graphical user interface [2]. VJ culture extends the idea of music DJs to create audiovisual cultural experiences. AVUIs were a set of creative coding tools that enabled the convergence of performance UI and creative visual output [3]. The Orchestra of Rocks is a continuing collaboration with visual artist Uta Kogelsberger that has manifested itself through physical and virtual forms - allowing multimodality over time [4]. Be it a physical exhibition in a gallery or audio reactive 3D animation on YouTube 360, the multiple modes in which an artwork is articulated support its original conceptual foundations. These four projects situate multimodal interaction at the heart of artistic research.