Ephemeral instruments

Vincent Goudard

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

This article questions the notion of ephemerality of digital musical instruments (DMI). Longevity is generally regarded as a valuable quality that good design criteria should help to achieve. However, the nature of the tools, of the performance conditions and of the music itself may lead to think of ephemerality as an intrinsic modality of the existence of DMIs. In particular, the conditions of contemporary musical production suggest that contextual adaptations of instrumental devices beyond the monolithic unity of classical instruments should be considered. The first two parts of this article analyse various reasons to reassess the issue of longevity and ephemerality. The last two sections attempt to propose an articulation of these two aspects to inform both the design of the DMI and their learning.

Citation:

Vincent Goudard. 2019. Ephemeral instruments. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3672990

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Goudard2019,
 abstract = {This article questions the notion of ephemerality of digital musical instruments (DMI). Longevity is generally regarded as a valuable quality that good design criteria should help to achieve. However, the nature of the tools, of the performance conditions and of the music itself may lead to think of ephemerality as an intrinsic modality of the existence of DMIs. In particular, the conditions of contemporary musical production suggest that contextual adaptations of instrumental devices beyond the monolithic unity of classical instruments should be considered. The first two parts of this article analyse various reasons to reassess the issue of longevity and ephemerality. The last two sections attempt to propose an articulation of these two aspects to inform both the design of the DMI and their learning.},
 address = {Porto Alegre, Brazil},
 author = {Vincent Goudard},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.3672990},
 editor = {Marcelo Queiroz and Anna Xambó Sedó},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 pages = {349--354},
 publisher = {UFRGS},
 title = {Ephemeral instruments},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2019/nime2019_paper067.pdf},
 year = {2019}
}