Expressive potentials of motion capture in musical performance

The paper presents the electronic music performance project Vis Insita implementing the design of experimental instrumental interfaces based on optical motion capture technology with passive infrared markers (MoCap), and the analysis of their use in a real scenic presentation context. Because of MoCap's predisposition to capture the movements of the body, a lot of research and musical applications in the performing arts concern dance or the sonification of gesture. For our research, we wanted to move away from the capture of the human body to analyse the possibilities of a kinetic object handled by a performer, both in terms of musical expression, but also in the broader context of a multimodal scenic interpretation.