Abstract
Two concepts are presented, extended, and unified in this paper: mobile device augmentation towards musical instruments design and the concept of hybrid instruments. The first consists of using mobile devices at the heart of novel musical instruments. Smartphones and tablets are augmented with passive and active elements that can take part in the production of sound (e.g., resonators, exciter, etc.), add new affordances to the device, or change its global aesthetics and shape. Hybrid instruments combine physical/acoustical and “physically informed” virtual/digital elements. Recent progress in physical modeling of musical instruments and digital fabrication is exploited to treat instrument parts in a multidimensional way, allowing any physical element to be substituted with a virtual one and vice versa (as long as it is physically possible). A wide range of tools to design mobile hybrid instruments is introduced and evaluated. Aesthetic and design considerations when making such instruments are also presented through a series of examples.
Highlights
We introduce a series of tools completing the framework presented in this paper to approach musical instrument design in a multimodal way where physical acoustical parts can be “virtualized”
We introduce the FAUST Physical Modeling Library (FPML), “the core” of our framework, that can be used to implement a wide range of physical models of musical instruments to be run on a mobile device
While the single analog input available on most mobile devices allows for the connection of one acoustical element, having access to more independent analog inputs would significantly expend the scope of the type of instruments implementable with our framework
Summary
The concept of musical controller is not new and was perhaps invented when the first organs were made centuries ago. The rise of analog synthesizers in the middle of the twentieth century, followed a few decades later by digital synthesizers almost systematized the dissociation of the control-interface and sound-generation in musical instrument design. This gave birth to a new family of musical instruments known as “Digital Musical Instruments” (DMIs). Marc Battier defines DMIs from a “human computer interaction (HCI) standpoint” as “instruments that include a separate gestural interface (or gestural controller unit) from a sound generation unit [1].” This feature that originally resulted from logical engineering decisions encouraged by the use of flexible new technologies, became one of the defining components of DMIs [2,3]. This paper addresses the first and the third issues pointed out by Cook and builds upon his work by providing a framework to design remutualized instruments reconciling the haptic, the physical, and the virtual
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