Mark T Marshall E-mail Response

Below is the main advice given by Mark T Marshall:

Regarding your project, I think it is an excellent idea. Be aware however that designing a DMI that is as good as an acoustic instrument is quite difficult. One of the major issues, particularly with a year long project, is that you (or any performers) have a limited time to learn the instrument. This means that it needs to be quite easy to pick up, but it should also be interesting to play. This is a point made by Wessel and Wright in [1]. The other major issue is proving that the instrument is any good. The best way to do this is to have musicians (ideally a number of them) play the instrument. Musicians know what has musical potential and what doesn't. Feedback from them will help guide the design and also can be used to show that the instrument is actually any good. This area (evaluating a DMI) is something I am working on at the moment, and is not an easy thing to do.

There have been lots of projects to build new DMIs. The NIME proceedings are full of them for example. However, very few of them have really been designed to compete with acoustic instruments. One excellent thesis dealing with this is by Newton Armstrong ([2] in the reference list below). I would strongly recommend you read it. It's a bit hard going at times, and I really don't think the final instrument follows the guidelines he sets out, but it is the best discussion of the design process I've seen.

One of the few really successful instruments I've seen when it comes to engaging performers is Joe Malloch's T-Stick. There's a bunch of information about it on http://www.idmil.org in the projects section. I suggest you have a read of some of the papers written about it also.

Finally, you need to put a lot of effort into the mapping. When we worked on the McGill Digital Orchestra instruments, this was the part that we found needed the most work. It helps if this is done along with any performer's who will be playing the instrument (if there will be any other than yourself). Have a look at [3] and [4] for information on how we went about doing this. Also on the subject of mapping, check out the papers in the special issue of Organised Sound on mapping [5].

My main advice for the project itself is to start playing the instrument as soon as possible. While you can use the existing literature to guide you, it's only once you've tried to play the instrument that you can tell if it will work at all.

[1] Wessel and Wright, "Problems and prospects for intimate musical control of computers"
[2] Newton Armstrong, "An enactive approach to digital musical instrument design"
[3] Sean Ferguson and Marcelo M. Wanderley. "The McGill Digital Orchestra: Interdisciplinarity in Digital musical Instrument Design"
[4] Xenia Pestova, Erika Donald, Heather Hindman, Joseph Malloch, Mark T. Marshall, Fernando Rocha, Stephen Sinclair, D. Andrew Stewart, Marcelo M. Wanderley, and Sean Ferguson. "The CIRMMT/McGill Digital Orchestra Project".
[5] Marcelo M. Wanderley (guest editor). Mapping Strategies in Real-time Computer Music. Organised Sound, 7(2), August 2002.