The effect of visualisation in New Interfaces For Musical Expression using Kinect

This paper concerns KiNotes, a New Interface for Musical Expression developed for Kinect sensor hardware. KiNotes is a camera controlled joint tracking interface allowing users to play musical notes through hand movements. Two visual-isations were developed as part of the system (1: an onscreen abstract 3D graphics render of the user and areas of inter-action, and 2: a camera video feed). An experiment with 36 participants was conducted to compare and analyse both visualisations with regard to interaction. Our findings show that a 3D graphics rendered visualisation is preferable, and displaying interaction areas onscreen is encouraged. Various specific interaction measures were also found to significantly differ between visualisations. With these findings this ex-ploratory research serves to add to the field of Kinect based camera controlled musical interfaces