Gestural Control of Music Using the Vicon 8 Motion Capture System

This article reports on a project that uses unfettered gestural motion for expressive musical purposes. The project involvesthe development of, and experimentation with, software to receive data from a Vicon motion capture system, and to translate and map that data into data for the control of music and other media such as lighting. In addition to the commercially standard MIDI—which allows direct control ofexternal synthesizers, processors, and other devices—other mappings are used for direct software control of digital audio and video. This report describes the design and implementation of the software, discusses specific experiments performed with it, and evaluates its application in terms of aesthetic pros and cons