We start this issue’s articles with Monica Lim and Natalia Kotsani’s presentation of their gestural controller called Handmate. Handmate runs in a Web browser, utilizing the computer’s webcam to track movements of the user’s hands in the air. There are three versions: Handmate Effects, in which the hand gestures trigger or continuously modify audio effects applied to the microphone input or to a user-supplied sound file; Handmate MIDI, which uses Web MIDI to send MIDI messages to other applications such as digital audio workstations; and Handmate OSC, which similarly sends Open Sound Control messages. The authors provide measures of the system’s accuracy, before describing results of a controlled user survey as well as “in-the-wild” user feedback on social media.
A decade ago, two coauthors of this issue’s second article—Christopher Haworth and Rodrigo Cádiz—coauthored, with Gary Kendall, an article in Computer Music Journal 38:4 (Winter 2014). That article described a method...