Gesture ≈ sound experiments: Process and mappings

This paper reports on outcomes of a residency undertaken at STEIM, Amsterdam, in July 2007. Our goal was to explore methods for working with sound and whole body gesture, with an open experimental approach. In many ways this work can be characterised as prototype development. The sensor technology employed was three-axis accelerometers in consumer game-controllers. Outcomes were intentionally restrained to stripped-back experimental results. This paper discusses the processes and strategies for developing the experiments, as well as providing background and rationale for our approach. We describe “vocal prototyping ” – a technique for developing new gesture-sound mappings, the mapping techniques applied, and briefly describe a selection of our experimental results