Designing Musical Cyberinstruments with Body and Soul in Mind
Tamas Ungvary, Roel Vertegaal · Journal of New Music Research · 2000
For centuries, traditional musical instruments have been built to control specific types of sound production processes according to the same principles: their control and sound generation parts are typically tightly integrated with a solid physical interface. Current-day digital counterparts lack such requirement of physicality in their control, and very few last more than a couple of years. In this paper, we argue that the flexibility of computer music instrument designs has inhibited the development of dedicated control structures, as well as the training of musicians with associated motor skills. As a candidate solution to this problem we present SensOrg, first in a class of Cyberinstruments that we envision to be a more generic and hopefully long-lasting class of control structures for digital instruments. SensOrg is a hand controlled Cyberinstrument, sculpted from a modular assembly of input/output devices and musical software that are mapped and arranged according to essential functional characteristics of the Human-Instrument system. We discuss how the cognitive ergonomics of non-verbal performance and symbolic compositional tasks influenced the design of our hardware interface. We also sketch the design of our underlying software framework, IGMA (Interactive Gesture Mapping), which provides interactive musical functionality for improvisation, composition and performance alike.