Gestural Sound Toolkit: Reflections on an Interactive Design Project

Baptiste Caramiaux (1, 2, 3) , Alessandro Altavilla (4) , Jules Françoise (5, 6, 3, 7) , Frédéric Bevilacqua (8)

1 SU - Sorbonne Université
2 ISIR - Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique
3 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
4 University of York
5 LISN - Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique
6 Université Paris-Saclay
7 AMI - Architectures et Modèles pour l'Interaction - LISN
8 IRCAM - Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique

The NIME and HCI domains have seen the emergence of several tools for designing expressive gestural interactions with sounds. Each tool has its own specificity, such as high versatility through low-level APIs, or inclusion of non-expert users through high-level components and demonstration-based design workflows. In this short paper, we present a toolkit, called Gestural Sound Toolkit (GST), that we have been using for the past nine years in research projects and teaching. We describe this toolkit and the design process that led to its current status. Our goal is to reflect on the decisions made, and to highlight the factors of these decisions, or their arbitrariness. In doing so, we hope to provide insights for the development of tools for designing gestural interaction with sound.

Keywords: Qualitative Methods; Sound Design; Gesture Design; Machine Learning

Domains: Musicology and performing arts; Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]

Baptiste Caramiaux, Alessandro Altavilla, Jules Françoise, Frédéric Bevilacqua. Gestural Sound Toolkit: Reflections on an Interactive Design Project. International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Jun 2022, Auckland, New Zealand. ⟨hal-03800322⟩