Musical sonification of avatar physiologies, virtual flight and gesture

Abstract

Virtual actors moving through interactive game-space environments create rich streams of data that serve as drivers for real-time musical sonification. The paradigms of avian flight, biologically-inspired kinesthetic motion and manually-controlled avatar skeletal mesh components through inverse kinematics are used in the musical performance work ECHO::Canyon to control real-time synthesis-based instruments within a multi-channel sound engine. This paper discusses gestural and control methodologies as well as specific mapping schemata used to link virtual actors with musical characteristics.