Living on the Edge: Alternate Controllers and the Obstinate Interface
Joseph Butch Rovan · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2009
What can one say about the apparently endless supply of new electronic instruments?1 Born in labs or garages, they bear witness to a desire for new forms of musical expression. They are also a specific manifestation of performance as a catalyst for research. Scholarly conferences devoted to computer music research regularly feature papers by inventors of alternate controllers.2 Some of these instruments are designed to harness new kinds of gesture; others extend existing instruments. If few make it to the stage, most never make it off the bench. One could almost see the past several decades of research and development as a long instrumental highway littered with the remains of discarded demos. In some cases, the technology no longer supports the concept, as new computer operating systems render the instrument unusable, or sensors break and cannot be replaced. In others, the instruments themselves have never become fully operative. What they have lacked, it seems, is a meaningful performance practice.