[CANCELLED] Andrew McPherson: "Sensorimotor skill and cultural factors in digital musical instrument design"

Every year, many new musical instruments are created in research and industry. New instruments are often promoted for technical novelty, range of sonic or expressive capabilities, or accessibility to novices. Amongst the dozens of instruments that have been released in recent crowd-funding campaigns, a common refrain is that the instrument allows anyone to easily make music, suggesting that a major barrier to widespread musical performance has been a lack of suitable instrument technology. However, most new instruments drop out of regular use after just a few years, while classic acoustic and electronic designs remain ubiquitous in many styles of music. Human factors are at least as important as technical ones in determining instrument uptake and longevity.

 

This talk will examine two specific human facets of new instrument design: sensorimotor skill and sociocultural factors. In the first case, it takes many years to achieve proficiency on an instrument, and a trained performer is unlikely to want to repeat the process afresh with an unfamiliar instrument. This talk will explore ways of designing new instruments which extend and repurpose existing expertise on familiar instruments. In the second case, instrumental performance is the locus of a rich set of aesthetic and social practices whose values should be considered at an early stage of any instrument design. Several illustrative examples will be presented from the research in the Augmented Instruments Laboratory at Queen Mary University of London, including comparative design studies in which two or more variations of an instrument are compared in a performance context. Rather than propose a definitive set of guidelines, the talk will conclude with open questions and reflections for how instrument creators can consider these human factors throughout the design process.