Intra-Actions: Experiments with Velocity and Position in Continuous Controllers

Continuous MIDI controllers commonly output their position only, with no influence of the performative energy with which they were set. In this paper, creative uses of time as a parameter in continuous controller mapping are demonstrated: the speed of movement affects the position mapping and control output. A set of SuperCollider classes are presented, developed in the author's practice in computer music, where they have been used together with commercial MIDI controllers. The creative applications employ various approaches and metaphors for scaling time, but also machine learning for recognising patterns. In the techniques, performer, controller and synthesis 'intra-act', to use Karen Barad's term: because position and velocity are derived from the same data, sound output cannot be predicted without the temporal context of performance.