Software as Instrument: COMDASUAR and the Co-Design of Code and Hardware

Rodrigo Cadiz, Federico Schumacher, Juan Parra Cancino, Michel Rozas, Tomás Koljatic, and Miguel Farias

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

This paper contributes a detailed reverse-engineered account of the COMDASUAR (Asuar's Digital--Analog Musical Computer), a hybrid musical computer developed in Chile between the late 1970s and 1980s. Built around an Intel 8080 microprocessor and integrated with analog synthesis modules and a frontal control panel for real-time parameter manipulation, the COMDASUAR combined hardware circuitry with an extensive software environment written in assembly language. Drawing on archival access to the original instrument and to José Vicente Asuar's handwritten notebooks, we document the system's modular software organization and analyze a previously unpublished retrogradation subroutine that reverses a musical voice in memory under strict resource constraints. Through this case study we extend ongoing NIME and computer-music discussions of software as a constitutive element of digital musical instruments, showing how compositional operations such as retrogradation are encoded directly as executable instrument functions, and how a corrective pass over musically meaningful control symbols (e.g., glissando and voice-end markers) makes the transformation both computational and musically informed. The COMDASUAR thus provides a historically grounded, Latin-American example of how instrumentality emerges from the co-design of code and hardware, complementing existing accounts that have largely centered on institutional computer-music environments in the United States and Europe.

Citation

Rodrigo Cadiz, Federico Schumacher, Juan Parra Cancino, Michel Rozas, Tomás Koljatic, and Miguel Farias. 2026. Software as Instrument: COMDASUAR and the Co-Design of Code and Hardware. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20784070 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_15,
 abstract = {This paper contributes a detailed reverse-engineered account of the COMDASUAR (Asuar's Digital--Analog Musical Computer), a hybrid musical computer developed in Chile between the late 1970s and 1980s. Built around an Intel 8080 microprocessor and integrated with analog synthesis modules and a frontal control panel for real-time parameter manipulation, the COMDASUAR combined hardware circuitry with an extensive software environment written in assembly language. Drawing on archival access to the original instrument and to José Vicente Asuar's handwritten notebooks, we document the system's modular software organization and analyze a previously unpublished retrogradation subroutine that reverses a musical voice in memory under strict resource constraints. Through this case study we extend ongoing NIME and computer-music discussions of software as a constitutive element of digital musical instruments, showing how compositional operations such as retrogradation are encoded directly as executable instrument functions, and how a corrective pass over musically meaningful control symbols (e.g., glissando and voice-end markers) makes the transformation both computational and musically informed. The COMDASUAR thus provides a historically grounded, Latin-American example of how instrumentality emerges from the co-design of code and hardware, complementing existing accounts that have largely centered on institutional computer-music environments in the United States and Europe.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {15},
 author = {Rodrigo Cadiz and Federico Schumacher and Juan Parra Cancino and Michel Rozas and Tomás Koljatic and Miguel Farias},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20784070},
 editor = {Benedict Gaster and João Tragtenberg and Anna Xambó and Tom Mitchell},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {},
 numpages = {8},
 pages = {116--123},
 title = {Software as Instrument: COMDASUAR and the Co-Design of Code and Hardware},
 track = {Paper},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_15.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}