GAMS: An Integrated Media Controller System
Will Bauer, Bruce Foss · Computer Music Journal · 1992
Over at least the past century, experimenters have explored alternative methods of allowing human gestures to control and generate art in various media. Most of these endeavors favored a specific art form. Within music, devices such as the Theremin (Rhea 1989), the Oculus Ranae (Collinge and Parkinson 1988), and The Hands (Waisvisz 1985) have been produced in attempts to map human gestures onto both the control and generation of sound. These control mechanisms are far different from traditional musical instruments. The Gesture and Media System (GAMS) is a further evolution in this area of alternative transduction. It is a sonar-based sensing system which allows the three-dimensional position of a performer to be sampled at a rate that can range from a few to several hundred Hertz. The sense-to-reaction delay is about 30 msec in a performance space 20 feet on a side. Positional accuracy can be traded off with sampling rate; the worst case is approximately plus or minus 3 inches while the best case is approximately plus one-eighth of an inch. The system allows for nine physical control parameters-the performer's position, velocity, and acceleration in each of the three spatial dimensions-to be mapped to any MIDI-controllable sound or vision parameters desired. This allows a performer to have control over the generation and expression of information from several media at once, allowing for the control of media performance in a truly integrated manner. The current GAMS system grew out of a 1988 Canada Council Explorations grant for the construction of a system that would allow a performer to control MIDI instruments by gestures in a threedimensional performance space. During the field testing of this prototype, it was realized that the true strength of this instrument lay in its potential to control several media at once through one performance interface. GAMS Hardware