Electronic Music Interface

Interesting paper by several people from the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL) at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

(…) When considering and categorizing devices that produce sound, it is common to become entangled in the differentiation of instruments, musical toys, and installations. Even within categories, confusion arises: conceptual models of musical instruments vary according to historical, cultural, and personal biases. New musical devices have varying degrees of success in penetrating the conceptual boundary between instrument and non-instrument, and frequently their path into the instrument domain is unexpected from the perspective of design intentionality. The issue is further confused by a layer of artistic interpretation, exploding the possible definitions of “instrument” to virtually any conceivable artifact that can involve sound (including the absence of sound). “Instrument” can thus refer to a traditional acoustic device, a controller with no specific mapping, a software program that maps control input to musical output, or can be synonymous with a musical piece itself, in which the interface (including its physical component) is integrated with musical sound output in the composer’s expressive intent [1]. However, a systematic investigation of the design space of a musical device (such as dimension space analysis [2]) promotes an understanding of musical devices that considers both design goals and constraints arising from human capability and environmental conditions. (…)

Read the full paper

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 10:14 and is filed under open instruments, physical computing, experimental, performance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.