Gestural Agency in Human-Machine Musical Interaction

Abstract

Musical technologies are evolving in such a way that they start to resemble the people that use them. In this vision it seems pertinent to abandon the conception of musicians as users of musical instruments in favor of machines and humans interacting to make music. Both the machine and the human can be modeled as embodied cognitive agents that comprise a network of musical gestures. These gestures are multi-modal signals that allow the agents to exert influence upon each other towards making music. This standpoint integrates traditional and novel music-making technologies, towards a better understanding of musical interaction.