Prototyping Electronic Digital Instruments

Digital musical instruments have significantly impacted how we compose, perform, and listen to music today. These new ways of creating and performing music are driven both by technological advancements and by the vision of innovators and musicians. On the consumer market, such new digital musical instruments appear in many different forms — from pocket-sized digital synthesizers made to play on the go to acoustic-inspired digital instruments designed to provide a familiar playing style but augmented with digital capabilities. This course holistically examines innovative digital musical instrument making. It explores the intersection of music and human-computer interaction and covers topics such as new interface design, instrument augmentation, musical expression and gesture, sound mapping, collaborative music-making, sensor and actuator technologies, musical instrument design in mixed reality, graphical score design for new musical interfaces, and performance techniques with new digital musical instruments. The course provides hands-on work designing, prototyping, programming, fabricating, and evaluating new digital musical instruments through laboratory exercises. Students will learn how to build their own musical instruments, compose for their novel instruments, and perform with the instruments they create.