And here is a pre-IDMIL paper (in French) about DMIs, what we called “Virtual Instruments” at that time.

This article was co-written with Philippe Depalle and Stéphane Tassart in 1997 (!) while the three of us were at Ircam, in Paris. Stéphane was a Ph.D. student around the middle/end of his thesis and I was in the first year of my Ph.D. at that time. Philippe was our supervisor.

As you might know, Philippe is a professor of Music Technology at McGill since the late 90’s. After his Ph.D., Stéphane was part of the original group at Applied Acoustics and co-designed their software Tassman.

This invited article was featured at Ircam’s Résonances, a bi-annual magazine about the activities of the Institute. This was published in September 1997, on Résonances #12.

It tries to identify the main trends in the fields of gestural control (before it was called NIME!) and sound synthesis. For instance, we try to clarify the difference between méta-instruments and hyperinstruments, signal and physical models of sounds, etc.

Interesting to note that we already discuss the ideas of direct vs indirect gestural acquisition (sensors vs. sound analysis, respectively) and mapping (which was called “lien instrumental”, in French).

Though an article in a magazine aimed at non-academics, it has been ?mentioned in at least one occasion: in the book “Histoire de la Musique”, edited by Marie-Claire Beltrando-Patier and published by Larousse in 1998 (Section “Le monde contemporain”, chapter “Un kaléidoscope fin du siècle”, pages 1154 and 1170 when discussing hyperinstruments and the méta-instrument, respectively), though, alas, with no reference to the original source.

The full paper (in French) is available from the Publications page.