This paper describes the adaptation of an existing model of human information processing for the categorization of digital musical instruments in terms of performance context and behavior. It further presents a visualization intended to aid the analysis of existing DMIs and the design of new devices. Three new interfaces constructed by the authors are examined within this framework to illustrate its utility. 1.

When learning a classical instrument, people often either take lessons in which an existing body of "technique" is delivered, evolved over generations of performers, or in some cases people will "teach themselves" by watching people play and listening to existing recordings. What does one do with a complex new digital instrument? In this paper I address this question drawing on my experience in learning several very di#erent types of sophisticated instruments: the Glove Talk II real-time gesture-to-speech interface, the Digital Marionette controller for virtual 3D puppets, and pianos and keyboards. As the primary user of the first two systems, I have spent hundreds of hours with Digital Marionette and Glove-Talk II, and thousands of hours with pianos and keyboards (I continue to work as a professional musician). I will identify some of the underlying principles and approaches that I have observed during my learning and playing experience common to these instruments. While typical accounts of users learning new interfaces generally focus on reporting beginner's experiences, for various practical reasons, this is fundamentally di#erent by focusing on the expert's learning experience.

Physics-based sound synthesis methods excel in their efficiency, expressiveness, and intuitive control, but they usually focus on a single sound source. Extending the control strategies to multiple sound sources is not straightforward because of the self-organization and complex group behavior exhibited by a large population of objects. By regarding each object of such a population as an agent, this contribution systematically evaluates the requirements and design principles of a multi-agent system for sound synthesis and control. In a restricted domain of hand clapping synthesis, it introduces a software application that partly corresponds to these requirements and principles. A list of updates for a better match has been deduced and prioritized. The subsequent versions of the software will incorporate these updates. 1.

A guitar-inspired touch-pad controller This paper discusses an implementation of a guitar-inspired gestural controller intended for interaction with continuous synthesis parameters in real-time. The controller uses a strip-shaped touch sensor for the left hand and a twodimensional touch-pad for the right hand, in place of the guitar’s neck and body. The intent is to create an interface that allows intuitive control of electro-acoustic sound textures while leveraging the performer’s enthusiasm and stage presence that is traditionally encouraged by the active stance required of the guitar.

In this paper we describe a virtual instrument or a performance space, placed at Hje Tstrup train station in Denmark, which is meant to establish communicative connections between strangers, by letting users of the system create soundscapes together across the rails.

Belgium (grant N◦716631). Its main goal is to foster the development of new media technologies through digital performances and installations, in connection with local companies and artists. numediart is organized around three major R&D themes: • HyFORGE- Hypermedia Navigation: Information indexing and retrieval rely classically on constrained languages to automatically describe contents and allow formulating queries, respectively. This approach becomes hardly applicable for multimedia contents such as music or video because of the disparity between computable low-level descriptors and desired high-level semantics- the so-called semantic gap. Alternatively, HyFORGE investigates human-in-the-loop approaches and innovative tools for structuring and searching multimedia contents. Along with audio and image processing, HyFORGE builds up on self-organizing models to derive enhanced views of multimedia collections and provide users with efficient browsing interfaces. • COMEDIA- Body & Media: COMEDIA is named from a French contraction between body and media or stage director and media, which nicely sums up the main objective of this axis: giving to bodies the means to be their own artistic director! Hence based on position on stage or choreography between multiple artists for the inter-relationship and gestures or voice for the intra-relationship, CO-

In this paper, we describe the development of a new musical instrument, called the HandSketch. This new instrument is developed in respect with the Convergent Luthery Model [10]. It means that this instrument has to be practicable right from the beginning of the prototyping, in order to allow the progressive embodiment of the object. This specificity leads us to focus our control paradigm on the writing.

Barcelona. Primary support was provided by the EU projects FP6-IST- 507913 Semantic Hi-Fi and FP6-

Part of the research presented in this dissertation has been carried out at

In this paper we present an interface whose design is based on four concepts: interface physicality, integrality of control, inertial sensing and performer energy measurement. An interface prototype is described which integrates these concepts in its design and its implementation details are presented. Findings from the initial performance experiments are given which illustrate its the musical potential and limitiations.