Giuseppe Torre

The hands: The making of a digital musical instrument

Michel Waisviszs The Hands is one of the most famous and long-lasting research projects in the literature of digital music instruments. Consisting of a pair of data gloves and exhibited for the first time in 1984, The Hands is a pioneering work in digital devices for performing live music. It is a work that engaged Waisvisz for almost a quarter of a century and, in turn, has inspired many generations of music technologists and performers of live music. Despite being often cited in the relevant literature, however, the documentation concerning the sensor architecture, design, mapping strategies, and development of these data gloves is sparse. In this article, we aim to fill this gap by offering a detailed history behind the development of The Hands. The information contained in this article was retrieved and collated by searching the STEIM archive, interviewing close collaborators of Waisvisz, and browsing through the paper documentation found in his personal folders and office.

A journey towards the development of a sound-led interdisciplinary performance: Agorá

Many live performance practitioners have explored the development of live gestural controllers in the hope of achieving natural and intimate interaction with their instrument. While the relevant literature offers a great deal of techniques for the development of mapping strategies that link physical gestures to sounds, resources and discussions on how these techniques have been used for the practical development of a live performance are, in comparison, less dense. The advantage of providing a detailed documentation that offers a clear picture as to how and why these strategies have been implemented in the context of a live performance would ultimately provide an additional and necessary tool for the proper analysis of the performance itself. This article presents, analyses and discusses the journey to the development of Agorá, a live sound theatre performance written for a custom-built data glove named ‘Pointing-at’. The analysis of both the theoretical and practical elements of performance formed the basis for the development of an approach to the design of nuanced gestural performative actions that are both visually and sonically understandable by audience members. In that regard, the use of metaphors that are coherent to the theme of the performance have been found to be a useful tool that can enhance both the performer and audience experience of the live performance.

Instrumentality, Time and Perseverance

In this article we discuss how the act of perceiving a digital object as a musical instrument can be considered as directly proportional to the amount (and quality) of time invested in its development and refinement to suit individual needs rather than generic ones. In that regard, the purpose-free approach to the design of generic controllers contrasts with a view of personalised tools developed and continuously redefined by the artist to fulfil artistic and musical needs. In doing so, the time invested relates to the artist/designer’s perseverance in a never-ending process of subjectification of the digital instrument identity. The discussion provided in the article is supported by a case study on one of the pioneers and developers of digital musical instruments: Michael Waisvisz (1949–2008) and his work on The Hands (first exhibited in 1984—last performance dated 2008). We argue that this almost 30-year long and engaged process of development and experimentation can be seen as a model, through which we can allow other musical devices to evolve from controllers of digital musical matter to instruments that may provide integrated and embodied possibilities for musical expression.