between the two. This situation is given in figure 1: the score space and the performance space contain music events, starting at the position of the black dots and having the duration of the length of the line. As discussed in Müller (2002), this model has been extended with lifted gesture spaces - more precisely a symbolic gesture space and a physical gesture space - together with a gesture transformation . The vertical relationships between the given spaces are defined by “freezing” the gesture spaces, or by “thawing” the score spaces. From this point of view, symbols in a musical score (e.g. the notes) can be seen as frozen symbolic gestures. This proposition is supported by the observation that today’s music notation originated from neumes. Neumes are an early form of music notation (Parrish, 1957), and the word “neume” is actually the Greek word for “hint”. Symbolic music notation can therefore be seen as a highly abstract way of writing down gestures.

3.1 Symbolic and Physical Gesture Curves

In our model 1, gestures are represented by parametric curves in a particular gesture space with a suitable number of dimensions. For example, the symbolic gesture curve in figure 1 models a gesture for a keyboard-like instrument with key (to define the pitch), position (to define how far a certain key is ‘pressed’) and onset (to define how onset time changes with the curve parameter ). However, in this case the performer is playing a monophonic voice. As we shall see later in this article,