The composing hand: Musical creation with leap motion and the bigbang rubette

Abstract

This paper introduces an extension of the Rubato Composer software’s BigBang rubette module for gestural composition. The extension enables composers and improvis-ers to operate BigBang using the Leap Motion controller, which uses two cameras to detect hand motions in three-dimensional space. The low latency and high precision of the device make it a good fit for BigBang’s functionality, which is based on immediate visual and auditive feedback. With the new extensions, users can define an infinite variety of musical objects, such as oscillators, pitches, chord progressions, or frequency modulators, in real-time and transform them in order to generate more complex musical structures on any level of abstraction.