Harmonic Motion: A Toolkit for Processing Gestural Data for Interactive Sound

We introduce Harmonic Motion, a free open source toolkit for artists, musicians and designers working with gestural data. Extracting musically useful features from captured gesture data can be challenging, with projects often requiring bespoke processing techniques developed through iterations of tweaking equations involving a number of constant values – sometimes referred to as ‘magic numbers’. Harmonic Motion provides a robust interface for rapid prototyping of patches to process gestural data and a framework through which approaches may be encapsulated, reused and shared with others. In addition, we describe our design process in which both personal experience and a survey of potential users informed a set of specific goals for the software.