Control Parameters for Musical Instruments - Daniel Levitan

Controll Parameters for Musical Instruments: a foundation for new mappinds from gesture to sound - Daniel Levitan et al (third result)

This is a brilliant paper. It offers up a new and detailed way of disecting a particular musical tone into its constituant parts, defined as selective cognitive preconditions, beginning, middle, end, terminus. It presents in details the choices we can make of how to execute each portion and what sonic results they will have and then goes onto combine these principals into the manners in which we can execute a tone as a whole, showing a decision path. According to the authors:


" The essential points are to
employ controls that are both consistent with how the
sound might have been created in a traditional musical
instrument (so as to exploit principles of cognition and
the mind), and to inspire designers to think about the
control of sound in ways that go beyond those employed
in traditional musical instruments (which are constrained
by physical, but not always cognitive factors). "

The concept of designing DMIs that operate in such away that their sonic responses to our gestures correspond to our pre-existing cognitive expectations is an interesting one. Another interesting thing about this article is one of the motivations of the authors:

" Our approach is the
consequence of one bias that we should reveal at the
outset: we believe that electronically controlled (and this
includes computer-controlled) musical instruments need
to be emancipated from the keyboard metaphor;
although piano-like keyboards are convenient and familiar,
they limit the musician’s expressiveness (Mathews
1991, Vertegaal and Eaglestone 1996, Paradiso 1997,
Levitin and Adams 1998). This is especially true in the
domain of computer music, in which timbres can be created
that go far beyond the physical constraints of traditional
acoustic instruments. "