Abstract

Introduction Joseph A. Paradiso Responsive Environments Group MIT Media Laboratory 77 Massachusetts Avenue, NE18-5F Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 USA joep@media.mit.edu Sile O'Modhrain Palpable Machines Group Media Lab Europe Sugar House Lane, Bellevue Dublin 8, Ireland sile@media.mit.edu 1) History and Evolution of Musical Controllers Throughout history, each set of technologies, from woodcraft to water pumps and from electricity to computers, has ushered its own set of changes into the way people generate and interact with music. Acoustic musical instruments have settled into canonical forms, taking centuries, if not millennia, to evolve their balance between sound production, ergonomics, playability, potential for expression, and aesthetic design. In contrast, electronic instruments have been around for little more than a century, during which rapid, often exponential (Kurzweil, 2000) advances in technology have continually opened new possibilities for sound synthesis

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