A Multi-touch Interaction Mapping Toolkit for Creating Musical Interfaces

This thesis describes my research into the development of a unit interaction model for multi-touch interactions in a musical context. To create this model of unit interactions, I first determined the most fundamental aspects of multi-touch that offer interaction build-ing blocks that can be combined in a variety of ways, allowing for a high degree of freedom to design and build musical interfaces. This unit interaction model is implemented via JunctionBox, a toolkit for mapping multi-touch input to control of music. With JunctionBox, composers, musicians, and programmers can build interfaces that combine multi-touch and mapping for use in a wide variety of musical contexts. As a toolkit, JunctionBox features multi-touch input tracking, mapping of input to output via messaging, output for graphical feedback, and flexible networking options. All of these features are designed such that they can be used in any combination, allowing for tremendous creative freedom in building interfaces. To put JunctionBox in a context, it is compared to other toolkits to examine its in-teraction features in comparison to other tools. The comparisons show that JunctionBo