Romain Michon's Dissertation Defense: The Hybrid Mobile Instrument — Recoupling the Haptic, the Physical, and the Virtual
Date:
Wed, 02/07/2018 - 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Stage
Event Type:
Other For those who are not able to attend in person, a live stream link will be available soon.
Abstract:
The decoupling of the "controller" from the "synthesizer" is one of the defining characteristic of digital musical instruments (DMIs). While this allows for much flexibility, this "demutualization" (as Perry Cook termed) sometimes results in a loss of intimacy between the performer and the instrument.
In this thesis, we introduce a framework to craft "mutualized" DMIs by leveraging the concepts of augmented mobile device, hybrid instrument design, and skill transfer from existing performer technique.
Augmented mobile instruments combine commodity mobile devices with passive and active elements that can take part in the production of sound (e.g., resonators, exciter, etc.), while adding new affordances to the device and changing its form and overall aesthetics. Screen interfaces can be designed to facilitate skill transfer, accelerating the learning and the mastery of such instruments.
Hybrid instrument design mutualizes physical and "physically-informed" virtual elements, taking advantage of recent progress in physical modeling and digital fabrication. This design ethos allows physical/acoustical elements to be substituted with virtual/digital ones and vice versa (as long as it is physically possible).
A set of tools to design hybrid mobile instruments is introduced and evaluated. Overall, we demonstrate how this approach can help digital luthiers to think about DMI design "as a whole" in order to create mutualized instruments. Through a series of case studies, we discuss aesthetic and design implications when making such hybrid instruments.
Streaming Link: https://youtu.be/OyZIauStwHY
FREE
Open to the Public