Active listening to a virtual orchestra through an expressive gestural interface: the orchestra explorer

In this paper, we present a new system, the Orchestra Explorer, enabling a novel paradigm for active fruition of sound and music content. The Orchestra Explorer allows users to physically navigate inside a virtual orchestra, to actively explore the music piece the orchestra is playing, to modify and mold the sound and music content in real-time through their expressive full-body movement and gesture. An implementation of the Orchestra Explorer was developed and presented in the framework of the science exhibition "Cimenti di Invenzione e Armonia", held at Casa Paganini, Genova, from October 2006 to January 2007.