Luke Dahl PhD Thesis Defense: Timing of Discrete Musical Air-Gestures

Motion sensing technologies enable musical interfaces where a performer controls sound by moving their body ``in the air" without manipulating or contacting a physical object. These interfaces work well when the movement and sound are smooth and continuous, but it has proven difficult to design a system which triggers discrete sounds with precision that feels natural to the performer and allows for complex rhythmic performance.

In order to design more rhythmically accurate and responsive air-instruments we need to understand what people do when they gesture in the air to make a sound, and what aspects of their movement should be used to trigger the sound. This dissertation presents a study of “air-drumming” in which participants performed drumming-like gestures in time to simple drum rhythms.  Various movement features are extracted from these gestures, and the timing of these features with respect to the onset of audio events is analyzed, leading to recommendations for better air-instrument design.