Towards a gesture description interchange format

Abstract

This paper presents our need for a Gesture Description Interchange Format (GDIF) for storing, retrieving and sharing information about music-related gestures. Ideally, it should be possible to store all sorts of data from various commercial and custom made controllers, motion capture and computer vision systems, as well as results from different types of gesture analysis, in a coherent and consistent way. This would make it possible to use the information with different software, platforms and devices, and also allow for sharing data between research institutions. We present some of the data types that should be included, and discuss issues which need to be resolved.