Andrew McPherson

This article reports on an interview-based study with ten sound artists and composers, all engaged in situated sonic practices. We propose that these artists engage the ear and shape possible interactions with the artwork by altering the relationship between sound, the space in which it is heard and the people who hear it. Our interviews probe the creative process and explore how a sound artist’s methods and tools might influence the reception of their work. A thematic analysis of interview transcriptions leads us to characterise artist processes as mediatory, in the sense that they act in between site and audience experience and are guided by the non-human agencies of settings and material things. We propose that artists transfer their own situated and embodied listening to that of the audience and develop sonic and staging devices to direct perceptual activity and listening attention. Our findings also highlight a number of engagement challenges, in particular the difficulty artists face in understanding their audience’s experience and the specificity of an artwork’s effect not just to its location but also to the disposition, abilities and prior experiences of listeners.

This article explores the ways specific hardware and software technologies influence the design of musical instruments. We present the outcomes of a compositional game in which music technologists created simple instruments using common sensors and the Pure Data programming language. We identify a clustering of stylistic approaches and design patterns, and we discuss these findings in light of the interactions suggested by the materials provided, as well as makers' technomusical backgrounds. We propose that the design of digital instruments entails a situated negotiation between designer and tools, wherein musicians react to suggestions offered by technology based on their previous experience. Likewise, digital tools themselves may have been designed through a similar situated negotiation, producing a recursive process through which musical values are transferred from the workbench to the instrument. Instead of searching for ostensibly neutral and all-powerful technologies, we might instead embrace and even emphasize the embedded values of our tools, acknowledging their influence on the design of new musical artifacts.

On several keyboard instruments the produced sound is not always dependent exclusively on a discrete key-velocity parameter, and minute gestural details can affect the final sonic result. By contrast, variations in articulation beyond velocity have normally no effect on the produced sound when the keyboard controller uses the MIDI standard, used in the vast majority of digital keyboards. In this article, we introduce a novel keyboard-based digital musical instrument that uses continuous readings of key position to control a nonlinear waveguide flute synthesizer with a richer set of interaction gestures than would be possible with a velocity-based keyboard. We then report on the experience of six players interacting with our instrument and reflect on their experience, highlighting the opportunities and challenges that come with continuous key sensing.

It is widely accepted that acoustic and digital musical instruments shape the cognitive processes of the performer on both embodied and conceptual levels, ultimately influencing the structure and aesthetics of the resulting performance. In this article we examine the ways in which computer music languages might similarly influence the aesthetic decisions of the digital music practitioner, even when those languages are designed for generality and theoretically capable of implementing any sound-producing process. We examine the basis for querying the non-neutrality of tools with a particular focus on the concept of idiomaticity: patterns of instruments or languages which are particularly easy or natural to execute in comparison to others. We then present correspondence with the developers of several major music programming languages and a survey of digital musical instrument creators examining the relationship between idiomatic patterns of the language and the characteristics of the resulting instruments and pieces. In an open-ended creative domain, asserting causal relationships is difficult and potentially inappropriate, but we find a complex interplay between language, instrument, piece and performance that suggests that the creator of the music programming language should be considered one party to a creative conversation that occurs each time a new instrument is designed.

Smart Instruments are a family of musical instruments that embed sensors, actuators, wireless connectivity, and semantic audio technologies. This report describes one such example, a Smart Cajón, which is a box-shaped percussion instrument that includes Internet of Musical Things components. Co-design sessions were conducted with five professional cajón player participants. The players were invited to devise tangible mock-ups by placing the provided sensors on an acoustic cajón, and to express...