Motor Imagery: What Does It Offer for New Digital Musical Instruments?

There have been more interest and research towards multisensory aspects of sound as well as vision and movement, especially in the last two decades. An emerging research field related with multi-sensory research is 'motor imagery', which could be defined as the mental representation of a movement without actual production of muscle activity necessary for its execution. Emphasizing its close relationship and potential future use in new digital musical instruments (DMI) practice and reviewing literature, this paper will introduce fundamental concepts about motor imagery (MI), various methods of measuring MI in different configurations and summarize some important findings about MI in various studies. Following, it will discuss how this research area is related to DMI practice and propose potential uses of MI in this field.