I spent most of my week long break from teaching continuing development of my Gestural Music Sequencer. I’m not sure if I should call it a sequencer or an arpeggiator. It’s really more like an instrument than either of those. The Gestural Musical Instrument perhaps?

Anyway, it’s far from complete, but I added the ability to toggle sustain on the notes as well a menu to choose from available MIDI device drivers. I decided to use a library for Processing called controlP5 to build the UI controls as shown in the screen grab to the right. All of the controls allow keyboard input, so the application can function while the interface is hidden, only displaying the video.

I’m also planning on adding a function to drop video files into the application to create musical phrases from pre-recorded video pieces. Here’s a section of audio captured from the GMS while attached to the Java Sound Synthesizer Sun Microsystems driver. The default sound for this device is an acoustic piano. You can hear the sustain stop around fifteen seconds in then come back on at the end.

GMS Piano Arpeggio