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From: alves@nunki.usc.edu (William Alves)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: dancing midi
Message-ID: <9003@chaph.usc.edu>
Date: 9 Apr 90 16:35:31 GMT
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Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
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Mark Coniglio at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal-Arts) in Valencia
has developed a series of accelerometers which are placed on a dancer's body.
When the dancer moves that part of the body in a particular axis of motion,
a MIDI signal is sent over radio control to a computer. His Mac-based soft-
ware listens for particular signals and can react by simply routing that
MIDI signal to the appropriate module, or may react by playing a pre-stored
sequence, or may react in a number of different ways. The signal sent from
the dancer may be tuned to a particular MIDI message, and the velocity or
controller amount may be proportional to the strength of the movement. The
sensors on the dancer's body, it should be noted, are *motion*, not *location*,
detectors. That is, a dancer does not trigger it by finding a particular
point in absolute space, but by moving a certain way at any place. I saw
a demo of this system with a piece composed by Coniglio at Cal-Arts a week
ago Sunday. He didn't have all the hardware running as smoothly as he wanted,
but is planning a new version with smaller and more robust hardware and 
cleaner radio transmitters.

Bill Alves
USC School of Music / Center for Scholarly Technology