Some remarks on musical instrument design at STEIM
Joel Ryan · Contemporary Music Review · 1991
At STEIM most research is applied towards specific projects of resident artists and composers. A large portion of this work is for live performance with digital electronics. Hardware and software designers are guided to take idiosyncrasy rather than generality as the prime guiding principle but have managed to create recyclable musical tools. An empirical method is promoted for both artist and technologist in order to recover the physicality of music lost in adapting to the abstractions of technology. The emphasis is on instrument design as a response to the questions posed by each artist's heterogeneous collections of ideas and tools.