Patent ID: 8772621

Claim:
A method comprising: using a first portable computing device as a synthetic string instrument; presenting on a multi-touch sensitive display of the portable computing device, and in correspondence with a musical score, temporally synchronized visual cues relative to respective strings of the synthetic string instrument; capturing user gestures indicative of length of respective strings of the synthetic string instrument from data sampled in correspondence with respective finger contacts with the multi-touch sensitive display along visual depictions of the respective strings; capturing user gestures indicative of excitation of at least one of the strings; encoding a gesture stream for a performance of the user by parameterizing at least a subset of the string length and string excitation indicative user gestures; and audibly rendering the performance on the portable computing device using the encoded gesture stream as an input to a digital synthesis of the synthetic string instrument executing on the first portable computing device, wherein the captured gesture stream, and not the musical score itself, drives the digital synthesis.