The sense of touch is of great importance when playing traditional musical instruments. Rich tactile response is however lacking in the current generation of digital musical interfaces. The project defines and pursues a novel approach to the design and evaluation of future digital musical interfaces providing active tactile feedback.
The sense of touch is of great importance when playing traditional musical instruments. Rich tactile response is however lacking in the current generation of digital musical interfaces. The project defines and pursues a novel approach to the design and evaluation of future digital musical interfaces providing active tactile feedback.
Context and Motivation
Recent studies support the idea that tactile interaction in instrumental practice is key to achieving top performance levels, and supports expressivity and self-monitoring. This is however a critical aspect of digital musical instruments, since they generally do not offer rich tactile feedback. In order to recover such lost physicality and provide enhanced user experience and performance, we hypothesize that future digital musical instruments will implement active tactile feedback. Currently however, research on actuated digital musical instruments is often grounded on practice and intuition only, leading to the production of one-of-a-kind devices, and usually leaving out proper evaluation methodologies, thus preventing the achievement of general results.
Methodology and Objectives
This interdisciplinary project – which deals with human-computer interaction, musical practice, engineering and applied psychology – aims at setting a novel systematic and scientifically founded methodology to design and evaluate digital musical interfaces that provide audio-haptic feedback. The project will proceed iteratively through 1) experiments for investigating the role of the auditory and haptic modalities in instrumental practice, 2) measurement of vibrations and forces in musical instruments, and 3) development of prototype interfaces.