Democratising DMIs: the relationship of expertise and control intimacy

Robert H Jack, Jacob Harrison, Fabio Morreale, and Andrew P. McPherson

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

• Year: 2018
• Location: Blacksburg, Virginia, USA
• Pages: 184–189
• DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1302539 (Link to paper)
• PDF link

Abstract:

An oft-cited aspiration of digital musical instrument (DMI) design is to create instruments, in the words of Wessel and Wright, with a ‘low entry fee and no ceiling on virtuosity'. This is a difficult task to achieve: many new instruments are aimed at either the expert or amateur musician, with few instruments catering for both. There is often a balance between learning curve and the nuance of musical control in DMIs. In this paper we present a study conducted with non-musicians and guitarists playing guitar-derivative DMIs with variable levels of control intimacy: how the richness and nuance of a performer's movement translates into the musical output of an instrument. Findings suggest a significant difference in preference for levels of control intimacy between the guitarists and the non-musicians. In particular, the guitarists unanimously preferred the richest of the two settings whereas the non-musicians generally preferred the setting with lower richness. This difference is notable because it is often taken as a given that increasing richness is a way to make instruments more enjoyable to play, however, this result only seems to be true for expert players.

Citation:

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Jack2018,
 abstract = {An oft-cited aspiration of digital musical instrument (DMI) design is to create instruments, in the words of Wessel and Wright, with a ‘low entry fee and no ceiling on virtuosity'. This is a difficult task to achieve: many new instruments are aimed at either the expert or amateur musician, with few instruments catering for both. There is often a balance between learning curve and the nuance of musical control in DMIs. In this paper we present a study conducted with non-musicians and guitarists playing guitar-derivative DMIs with variable levels of control intimacy: how the richness and nuance of a performer's movement translates into the musical output of an instrument. Findings suggest a significant difference in preference for levels of control intimacy between the guitarists and the non-musicians. In particular, the guitarists unanimously preferred the richest of the two settings whereas the non-musicians generally preferred the setting with lower richness. This difference is notable because it is often taken as a given that increasing richness is a way to make instruments more enjoyable to play, however, this result only seems to be true for expert players.},
 address = {Blacksburg, Virginia, USA},
 author = {Robert H Jack and Jacob Harrison and Fabio Morreale and Andrew P. McPherson},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1302539},
 editor = {Luke Dahl, Douglas Bowman, Thomas Martin},
 isbn = {978-1-949373-99-8},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 pages = {184--189},
 publisher = {Virginia Tech},
 title = {Democratising {DMI}s: the relationship of expertise and control intimacy},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2018/nime2018_paper0039.pdf},
 year = {2018}
}