Toward an action based metaphor for gestural interaction with musical contents.

Technology-mediated music access is more and more becoming an interactive process, involving non-linguistic communication and action-based modalities. A better understanding of the musical experience and how this experience can be described is a crucial issue to render more effective and natural the interaction with musical contents. This paper aims at verifying if and how non-linguistic descriptors can be related to musical stimuli and their expressive cues. We designed four experiments using two sets of musical stimuli (simple and complex) and two sets of non-linguistic descriptors (acoustic and haptic), that we called attractors. In particular, the haptic attractors simulate the mechanic concepts of friction, elasticity and inertia (FEI). The results showed that subjects are able to relate musical stimuli with both acoustic and haptic attractors, even if the FEI metaphor seems to be more suitable for describing expressive cues in simple musical excerpts, where the expressive content is mainly related to performance cues, than in complex musical stimuli, where musical structure is more relevant.