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Abstract:

This thesis explores solutions to smooth the challenging path for digital musical instruments (DMIs) and mapping tools to reach a state of maturity and usability by artists, discussing development and design practices with the goal of producing easy-to-set-up, stable, and well-documented academic projects. The concepts of technical maturity and stability are dened, using the user’s perspective to introduce qualities of devices in music technology that support maturity. Barriers to these attributes are reviewed from literature, discussing the lifecycle tendencies of projects developed in research contexts based on design intents. Possible solutions to these barriers are then applied to two main case studies: 1) the development of the Slapbox, a responsive, reliable and replicable percussion DMI designed for intensive musical use, and 2) the expansion of libmapper, a distributed mapping framework created at the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL), to address challenges to its setup, operation and integration with popular artistic tools. Evaluations with artists are then conducted for both projects to determine the effects of the proposed practices on the usability of novel DMIs and mapping tools. Finally, the implementations and results from each project are summarized, proposing paths for future work and describing applications to other projects.

Publication Details:

IDMIL Participants:

• Brady Boettcher

Additional Information:

Boettcher_Brady_thesis_Final

Related Projects

Mapper4Live

Slapbox