At the other end, the power of the computer can be exploited to map basic gesture into complex sound generation, allowing even non musicians to conduct, initiate and to some extent control a dense musical stream. While the former efforts will push the application of noninvasive, precision sensing technologies in very demanding real-time user interfaces, the latter relies more on pattern recognition, algorithmic composition, and artificial intelligence. Likewise, there is considerable debate surrounding the groundrules of a digital performance. For example, when a violinist plays their instrument, the audience has a reasonable idea of what they'll be hearing in response, but with any possible sonic event resulting from any gesture on an unfamiliar digital interface, the performing artist risks losing his audience. Again, this topic is being argued from many sides as the boundaries blur between performer and audience and between linear compositions and interactive media.
Musical mapping is a very important component of all modern musical systems.
The first MIDI mappers were all done in hardware, with an embedded microprocessor interpreting a MIDI stream and outputting additional or modified MIDI events, depending on what behavior was programmed into the device. Examples of this include the multimodal performance mapper made by the author for jazz keyboardist Lyle Mays and several devices made by Oberheim during the late 1980's, such as the Strummer , which converted keyboard events into multiple-triggers to simulate guitar strumming and the Cyclone , which embellished played notes with others generated through a programmable set of musical rules, thereby augmenting the player's technique. The most well-known system in this area is Opcode 's MAX , developed by Miller Puckette at UCSD . MAX, originally built only for MIDI control, has been extended into sound synthesis with David Zicarelli's MSP package, which uses the PowerPC Processor of a Macintosh computer to generate real-time digital audio under MAX control. The Kyma package by Symbolic Sound is also a powerful graphical programming environment that allows specification of both synthesis algorithms and control functionsAnother graphical interface, Interactor , has been developed for interactive dancers by Mark Coniglio and CalArts composer Morton Subotnick .