Noisebox: Design and Prototype of a New Digital Musical Instrument
John Sullivan · 2015
This paper documents the initial prototyping of a new digital musical instrument. Specifically, it focuses on design of the interface, and contextualizes the project through some of the existing research in the field of gestural control of new musi-cal instruments. The project began with a concept for a stand-alone hand-held polyphonic synthesizer called the Noisebox (Figure 1). Several key concepts and strategies were explored and implemented during its development, including: analysis and application of gesture in musical performance, choice of sensors and sensor conditioning, appropriate mapping strate-gies, and evaluation of user experience. The outcome yielded a functional prototype that fulfilled the initial goal of the project to design and build a working instrument from start to fin-ish. The stage documented here represents the first phase of a longer project. Future phases will conduct user tests to mea-sure the success of the instrument based on performer feed-back and refine the design through multiple iterations, lead-ing to a finished instrument. 1.