Exploring the Affordances and Musico-Spatial Performance Opportunities of a Virtual Drumming Environment

Abstract

The intersection of music and architecture (spatial design) has remained a fascination for practitioners and researchers for many years. This paper reports on the development of a Virtual Drumming Environment (VDE) that provides a research and cross-domain performance environment for musico-spatial design research explorations.The VDE is explored as a means of revealing affordances related to the complexities of polyrhythmic drumming through cross-domain representation of MIDI data as polyrhythmic event-time-dynamics molecules (PM) within virtual space. Further to this, we explore the VDE as a cross-domain performance environment where new modes of musico-spatial improvisation are revealed that extend drumming's `known worlds' (Bruford, 2015).