Percussionist-Centred Design for Touchscreen Digital Musical Instruments

Abstract

This article describes how percussive interaction informed the design, development, and deployment of a series of touchscreen digital musical instruments for ensembles. Percussion has previously been defined by techniques for exploring and interacting with instruments, rather than by the instruments themselves. Percussionists routinely co-opt unusual objects as instruments or create them from scratch. In this article, this process is used for the iterative design and evaluation of five mobile music apps by percussion ensembles. The groups helped refine the apps from prototype to performance through research rehearsals where they improvised, explored new musical gestures, and collaborated to develop practical performance strategies. As a result, the affordances and limitations of the apps were discovered, as were a vocabulary of percussive touch gestures. This article argues that this percussionist-centred process was an effective method for developing musical apps, and that it could be applied more widely in designing musical computer systems.

Keywords:

• Percussion
• Digital Musical Instruments
• Design
• Mobile Music
• Collaborative Development
• Human–Computer Interaction

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the percussionists of Ensemble Evolution (Maria Finkelmeier and Jacob Remington), and Ensemble Metatone (Christina Hopgood, Jonathan Griffiths, and Yvonne Lam) for their important contributions, as well as the other musicians who have performed with his apps. He gratefully acknowledges the support of the Research School of Computer Science and School of Music at the Australian National University in conducting this research as well as the advice and guidance of Henry Gardner and Ben Swift.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Charles Martin is a specialist in percussion, computer music and human computer interaction. He links percussion with electroacoustic music and other media through new and emerging technologies. Charles has founded ensembles specialising in interactive theatre and improvised touchscreen performance who have toured throughout Australia, Europe and the USA. In 2016, Charles joined the EPEC (Engineering Predictability with Embodied Cognition) project at the University of Oslo to develop new musical systems that predict their users’ actions and preferences.

ORCID

Charles P. Martin http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5683-7529

Notes

1 The design and motivations for the ensemble director agent are outside the scope of this article but can be found elsewhere (Martin, Gardner, & Swift, 2015a).

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by The Research Council of Norway as a part of the Engineering Predictability with Embodied Cognition (EPEC) project, under grant agreement 240862.