Before designing or making any concrete plans for the Conductor’s Jacket I first investigated the intellectual and historical precedents. Since the idea of gestural music is very new, there is no established academic tradition for it. I started my search in the space between instrument building, interface design, physiology, and aerodynamics. Ultimately I found sources across a variety of disciplines, including computer music, classical music, affective computing, gesture recognition, and human-computer interface design. I also reviewed the literature in the areas of wearable musical interfaces, interactive music systems, gesture, neurophysiology, pattern recognition and signal processing. Perhaps most important was the issue of expressivity in electronic musical performance, in which there is a growing body of work. Details about sensors and technologies, while important to the implementation of the project, were less critical in formulating the ideas of the project. The figure below represents the intersections of the various fields involved:
The discussion of background and related work will begin with a quick review of highlights from the pedagogical literature on conducting, followed by the only other physiological study of a conductor that I have come across, which looked at a single conductor’s heart rate during various activities. Next, I cover theories of emotion and expression in music. I follow that with a review of theoretical frameworks for mappings between gestures and music. Finally, I discuss other interactive systems for conductors and describe the class of wearable interfaces for real-time interactive music, including the BodySynth, BioMuse, and Miburi.
2.1 Conducting and Interpretation Pedagogy
Conducting is a precise system of gestures that has evolved its symbolic meanings over approximately 300 years. While a huge variety of techniques are used, there is a canon of literature on the subject that attempts to clarify and define the basic elements of the technique. Among the most widely used textbooks on conducting in America today are Max Rudolf’s "The Grammar of Conducting," Elizabeth A.H. Greene’s "The Modern Conductor," Sir Adrian Boult’s, "A Handbook on the Technique of Conducting," Hermann Scherchen’s "Handbook of Conducting," Gunther Schuller’s "The Compleat Conductor," and Harold Farberman’s "The Art of Conducting Technique." These books are pedagogical discussions of the exact relationships between gesture and intended sound for the sake of the student. While it is not feasible to discuss the technique of conducting in detail here, segments from these books will be referred to in various places throughout this thesis.