Aspects of gesture in Digital Musical Instrument Design.

The flexibility of current hardware and software has made the mapping of relationships between a sound’s parameters and physical source of control a relatively trivial task. Consequently, the endeavor of sophisticated digital instrument design has been accessible to the creative community for several years, which has resulted in a host of new instruments that explore a variety of physical mappings. The emphasis on physicality exhibited by so-called “gestural controllers” stands in contrast to the practice of conventional laptop performance. While the laptop computer is certainly a digital musical instrument, its associated performance practice is often criticized based on a perceived lack of physicality. This paper examines motivations behind the foregrounding of gesture in computer-based performance. Critical theory and neuroscience research are drawn upon in order to consider ways in which the desire for connections between sound and motion amount to more than mere fascination with virtuosity.