Ha Dou Ken Music: Mapping a joysticks as a musical controller

The structure of a digital musical instrument (DMI) can be splitted up in three parts: interface, mapping and synthesizer. For DMI’s, in which sound synthesis is done via software, the interaction interface serves to capture the performer’s gestures, which can be mapped under various techniques to different sounds. In this work, we bring videogame controls as an interface for musical interaction. Due to its great presence in popular culture and its ease of access, even people who are not in the habit of playing electronic games possibly interacted with this kind of interface once in a lifetime. Thus, gestures like pressing a sequence of buttons, pressing them simultaneously or sliding your fingers through the control can be mapped for musical creation. This work aims the elaboration of a strategy in which several gestures captured by the interface can influence one or several parameters of the sound synthesis, making a mapping denominated many to many. Buttons combinations used to perform game actions that are common in fighting games, like Street Fighter, were mapped to the synthesizer to create a music. Experiments show that this mapping is capable of influencing the musical expression of a DMI making it closer to an acoustic instrument.