Summary
An ongoing motion capture study investigating the relationship between physical gestures, harmonic patterning, and instrument affordances.
In the video above, Daniel Shanahan plays a chord progression while the color pink on his index finger is tracked by a program I built in Max MSP. The boundaries of the pink tape are represented by the moving box on the right-hand screen. The midpoint of this box is taken on a frame-by-frame basis to approximate hand centering. Distance is then calculated from this coordinate data to investigate hypotheses which will be disclosed as the project develops.
See https://www.sheatheory.com/pop-rock for more information and an outline of our presentation at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition at New York University.