Rescuing Performance from the Demo: Co-Designing Drum Gesture Mappings with a Percussionist
Abstract
Augmenting instruments with sensors and neural network mappings is a well-explored digital musical instrument design approach. While augmentations can create new expressive opportunities, they also exert aesthetic influence and can constrain musicians'gestural language, which, if left unchecked, can lead to technological capture. To examine this, we conducted a study with a professional percussionist, co-developing a gesture mapping toolkit and recording a ten-track album. Drawing on the concept of productive dissonance, our study aimed to hold the musician's aesthetic in tension with technological constraints. This, along with a practice-based reflective approach, supported the development of a continuous gesture recognition method for percussive mapping and surfaced insights into the design process. We identify knowing-when as a form of tacit knowledge that supported productive dissonance, and raise an open question: absent a musician's broader social context, how do we know whether a technology's influence is genuinely supporting their practice?
