Use of Body Motion to Enhance Traditional Musical Instruments

This work describes a new approach to gesture mapping in a performance with a traditional musical instrument and live electronics inspired by theories of embodied music cognition (EMC) and musical gestures. Considerations on EMC and how gestures affect the experience of music inform different mapping strategies. Our intent is to enhance the expressiveness and the liveness of performance by tracking gestures via a multimodal motion capture system and to use motion data to control several features of the music. We then describe an application of such approach to a performance with electric guitar and live electronics, focusing both on aspects of meaning formation and motion capturing.