Gestroviser: toward collaborative agency in digital musical instruments

This paper describes a software extension to the Reactable entitled Gestroviser that was developed to explore musician machine collaboration at the control signal level. The system functions by sampling a performers input, processing or reshaping this sampled input, and then repeatedly replaying it. The degree to which the sampled control signal is processed during replay is adjustable in real-time by the manipulation of a continuous finger slider function. The reshaping algorithm uses stochastic methods commonly used for MIDI note generation from a provided dataset. The reshaped signal therefore varies in an unpredictable manner. In this way the Gestroviser is a device to capture, reshape and replay an instrumental gesture. We describe the result of initial user testing of the system and discuss possible further development.