Preserving Musical Performance on Touch-Screens

Musical performances with touch-screen devices can be recorded by capturing a log of touch interactions. This new-media object can serve as an archive or as a basis for other representations of the musical work. This paper presents a protocol for logging touch-interactions as well as visualisations and gesture-scores generated from logs of a series of improvised ensemble performances on iPads. These objects record the performances for posterity and also allow deeper analysis of musical interactions present.