Gesture elicitation to improve DJ to audience communication

When DJs perform they struggle to communicate their performance actions to their audience. DJs use turntables, CDJs, DJ mixers and/or computers with or without hardware DJ controllers. This equipment has small controls that are difficult to view from any distance. DJs bend over their equipment while performing small hand movements that are difficult for the audience to see. This research aims to investigate whether this visual communication problem can be solved by using full body gestures. The underlying motivation was to enhance DJ performance and the overall audience experience. Following a review of the relevant literature, this thesis begins by identifying common DJ techniques. Then gestures were elicited for each common DJ technique using the Gesture Elicitation Study (GES) methodology with the aim of creating a universally understood gesture set. The GES resulted in mainly low consensus, conflicting and inconsistent gestures which prevented an end-user gesture set from being directly produced. Therefore, three further gesture set creation studies were performed to try to create a conflict and inconsistency free gesture set. This project successfully created an end-user gesture set from the results of all four experiments. However, the inconsistencies and conflicts from these experiments suggest that that there is not a universal language that both DJs and audience members understand. Therefore, the strict GES method is deemed inappropriate for producing a DJ-audience communication focused gesture set; the author suggests adapting this methodology to involve subjective ratings to select the most suitable gestures.