A data glove based sensor interface to expressively control musical processes

Flexible sensors can find many useful applications detecting vibrations, contacts and impacts, air and liquid flows, pressures and compressions, displacements and motions. So they are utilized in the fields of robotic, medical, fitness, assistive technology, gaming, etc. But we want here point out the adoption of such sensors for realizing a data glove, capable to associate a sound to each single movement of every joint of the fingers of a human hand. In addition force sensing resistors, applied to each fingertip, measure the pressure applied on a surface when the hands mimic the gestures of a pianist. Previous works were already devoted to play sounds according to body movements, but as far as we know, to this aim no works take advantage on the measure of the complete degrees of freedom of a human hand. To this end, we present an innovative data glove based sensor interface that allows an electronic music composer to plan and conduct the musical expressivity of a performer. For musical expressivity we mean all those execution techniques and modalities that a performer has to follow in order to satisfy common musical aesthetics, as well as the desiderata of the composer. The proposed interface or virtual musical instrument is able to transform input parameters, supplied by hand movement, in many sound synthesis parameters. Especially, we focus our attention on mapping strategies based on Neural Network to solve the problem of music expressivity.