The impact of physical dimensions on musical gestural interaction in large digital musical instrument design
Lead Research Organisation:
Queen Mary University of London
Department Name: Sch of Electronic Eng & Computer Science
Abstract
This research is about the impact on musical gestural interaction of over-sized Digital Musical Instrument (DMI) design, that is instruments with physical dimensions that are larger than the human body performing them but smaller than the size of the room they are in. When interacting with an interface not only does the performer move their body to control the interface, the interface design and affordances control the way the performer moves their body. In the context of DMIs, two instruments with the same sonic capabilities will elicit different patterns of gestural interaction depending on their physical layout. Using the methodology of designing instruments for the purpose of exploring research questions, this research examines the gestural interaction made by performers on large DMIs to investigate how changes in size ultimately shape the gestural language of the performer, and through that the compositional choices they make.
This research investigates gestural interaction and how it shapes compositional choices through three studies. Each study examines the relative effects on performance and composition of various factors of affordances and idiomatic gestural language performed on large DMIs. Studying performer interactions on large instruments with novel layouts that participants have not yet developed idiomatic gestural languages will result in new discoveries that are relevant to the design of large instruments as well as instruments of all sizes. This research will be relevant for digital musical instrument designers and Human Computer Interaction researchers as it will elucidate the influence that a DMI's physical size and layout has on the performances and compositions created using digital musical instruments, so that designers can make informed decisions to either support or suppress specific influences in future DMI design. Further, through this research, I will contribute the design of a new family of digital musical instruments that can be used by digital musical instrument performers and researchers in the future.
This research investigates gestural interaction and how it shapes compositional choices through three studies. Each study examines the relative effects on performance and composition of various factors of affordances and idiomatic gestural language performed on large DMIs. Studying performer interactions on large instruments with novel layouts that participants have not yet developed idiomatic gestural languages will result in new discoveries that are relevant to the design of large instruments as well as instruments of all sizes. This research will be relevant for digital musical instrument designers and Human Computer Interaction researchers as it will elucidate the influence that a DMI's physical size and layout has on the performances and compositions created using digital musical instruments, so that designers can make informed decisions to either support or suppress specific influences in future DMI design. Further, through this research, I will contribute the design of a new family of digital musical instruments that can be used by digital musical instrument performers and researchers in the future.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Lia Mice (Student) |
Studentship Projects
| Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Student Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EP/N50953X/1 | 01/10/2016 | 30/09/2021 | |||
| 1925048 | Studentship | EP/N50953X/1 | 01/10/2017 | 31/05/2022 | Lia Mice |
| Description | Concert Series: Music and Installations from the Augmented Instruments Laboratory |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I am the main organiser of a concert series called Music and Installations from the Augmented Instruments Laboratory. I have also performed music and shown installations at these concerts. Each concert is hosted at IKLECTIK Art Lab, London, with the exception of the March 2021 edition which was live streamed on YouTube. The events have all sold out, with an audience of 100 people. The audiences consist of members of the general public, professional musicians and technologists, and academics (post-graduate, post-doctorate, lecturers and professors) from the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London. The musical performances at the concerts are by members of the research group that I am part of, the Augmented Instruments Laboratory, as well as visiting researchers. The concerts are an opportunity for us to show the digital musical instruments that we design as part of our research to the general public, discuss how they work and perform music created on them. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018,2019,2020,2021 |
| URL | http://instrumentslab.org/news/events/2019/11/27/lab-concert-november-2019.html |
| Description | Exhibition of a digital musical instrument at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) Digital Design Weekend |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I presented "Instrument Sematary", a digital musical instrument created from broken classical instruments at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) Digital Design Weekend, London UK in September 2019. Over the two-day exhibition, hundreds of members of the public engaged with my instrument and asked me about the work. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/q0nvJ80O/digital-design-weekend-sep-2019 |
| Description | Media and Arts Technology Campus Exhibition at Ars Electronica Festival |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The Media and Arts Technology (MAT) CDT was invited by Ars Electronica Festival to curate and invigilate a showcase of interactive artworks as part of the Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition. Each year approximately 10 artworks by 10 Media and Arts Technology CDT students were selected for the event. My artwork was shown at the Ars Electronica exhibition that was held in Linz, Austria in 2018 and 2019, and that was held online in 2020. In 2019 I was on the core organizing committee of the MAT Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018,2019,2020 |
| URL | https://ars.electronica.art/ |
| Description | Paper presentation at the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | I presented a 10 minute paper presentation at the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). The content of the presentation was the findings of "Study 1" of my PhD research in which ten participants interacted with a large scale digital musical instrument. The presentation was in the form of a pre-recorded 10 minute video that was live-streamed on the NIME conference website, followed by a 5-minute live question and answer session. Hundreds of academics, students and professional instrument designers were in the audience watching in real time, and the video remains online. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://nime2020.bcu.ac.uk/ |
| Description | Paper presentation at the International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | I traveled to Marseille, France in October 2019 to present a paper presentation at the Internation Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Researc (CMMR). The presentation was 10 minutes and was followed by a 5 minute question and answer session. The topic of the presentation was the findings of my paper "Embodied Cognition in Performers of Large Acoustic Instruments as a Method of Designing Large Digital Musical Instruments" which was also published at this symposium. The audience consisted of hundreds of academics, students and members of the public. My paper was later selected for publication in the LNCS edition of the symposium proceedings. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://cmmr2019.prism.cnrs.fr/ |
| Description | Paper presentation at the Symposium for Technology in Music Performance |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | I gave a 10 minute presentation on the outcomes of the scoping study of my PhD and the instruments that I designed in response to the scoping study findings. I outlined the instruments' creation process and how the instruments will be used for my upcoming PhD research. There was an audience of around 70 students and academics in the field of digital musical instrument design. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://timp.integra.io/ |
| Description | Talk and Performance at The Raw and the Cooked, Inter/Sections 2018 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | About 100 people attended a talk and music performance that I gave at The Raw and the Cooked, a two-day event as part of Inter/Sections. Inter/Sections is a festival curated and run by students of the Media and Arts Technology CDT PhD Programme at Queen Mary University of London. My talk was about a new interactive digital musical instrument that I created, called the ChandeLIA, which sparked discussion afterwards about interactive musical instruments. And my live music performance was part of the concert after the talks. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://therawandthecooked.intersections.io/ |
| Description | Technologist participant at the Absurd Music Hackathon, London UK |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | I participated in a two-day Hackathon on the topic of absurd musical instrument design. The outcome was the creation of a new digital musical instrument - Pipe Technology, created in collaboration with another hackathon participant/academic Tijs Ham. The outcome is that I learned more about digital musical instrument design and expanded my knowledge on the use of chaos in digital musical instrument systems - which has become an integral part of the musical instrument design of the instruments I have designed for conducting my PhD research. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | http://instrumentslab.org/news/events/2019/08/08/absurd-november-2019.html |
| Description | Technologist participant at the workshop on Innovative Instrument Design, Beijing China |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | In September 2019, I travelled to Beijing to participate in a week long Innovative Instrument Design cross-cultural exchange workshop in which technologists, performers and composers from UK and China collaboratively reimagined the duxianqin musical instrument. The outcome was three new augmented and digital duxianqin, performed by professional duxianqin performers at a concert at the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing on Friday 20th of September 2019. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | http://eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~nickbk/Duxianqin19/ |