The Interactive Piece The Bow is bent and drawn

This paper discusses the concepts, the interaction paradigms, the system design and implementation that have been developed for the interactive dance and music performance The Bow is bent and drawn (composer Nicola Ferrari), presented at Casa Paganini, Genova, Italy, in occasion of the opening concert of the 8th Intl. Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME08), June 4, 2008. The Bow is bent and drawn grounds its bases on current research at Casa Paganini – InfoMus Lab on social active listening of sound and music content and on analysis and processing of expressiveness in human full-body movement and gesture. In particular, The Bow is bent and drawn exploits our recent system Mappe per Affetti Erranti (literally Maps for Wandering Affects), which enables a novel paradigm for social active experience and dynamic molding of expressive content of a music piece. In Mappe per Affetti Erranti multiple users can physically navigate a polyphonic music piece and can intervene in real-time on the expressive content music performance conveys through their full-body movement and gesture. The research topics addressed in this paper are currently investigated in the EUICT Project SAME (Sound and Music for Everyone, Everyday, Everywhere, Every Way, www.sameproject.eu).