Hackable Instruments: Musical Interface Design for Appropriation, Modification and Creative Destruction

与大多数人机界面的设计相比，数字乐器设计提出了几个独特的挑战。就乐器而言，就像任何创造性表达工具一样，设计成功的标准很难量化，因为标准HCI（人机交互）的准确性和速度指标与音乐家发现的表达方式并不一定相关。更有问题的是设计师和用户之间的不稳定和不可预测的关系。从萨克斯管到电吉他再到唱机转盘，音乐家们一直在盗用甚至颠覆乐器设计，以设计师从未预料到的方式制作音乐。可以说，上个世纪音乐表演实践中一些最具变革性的变化来自于表演者从根本上重新诠释乐器的能力和局限性。因此，数字乐器研究人员面临着一个困境：如何设计一个界面，以容纳用户对其原始目标的故意颠覆？该项目将产生一种设计方法和一个硬件软件平台，用于创建“可编程乐器”：包含表演者重新诠释和修改的乐器。这种终端用户（错误）挪用目前在声学和模拟电子乐器中比数字乐器更普遍。典型的电脑音乐界面是这样设计的：非专业人士的任意修改更有可能产生灾难性的失败，而不是有趣的结果。此外，与操作简单易懂的原声乐器相比，数字乐器的工作方式缺乏透明度会阻碍演奏者充分探索其能力。用户研究与音乐家和乐器设计师形成了项目的基础。这些研究的目的是了解音乐家在适应乐器需求时所采用的探索过程，并确定乐器设计的哪些特征有助于创造性的重新利用。同时，对嵌入式设备上音频处理的基础研究将导致硬件仪器平台对最终用户的修改具有鲁棒性。使用该平台，将创建几个仪器设计，以测试有关促进仪器“可编程性”因素的特定假设。这些设计将在扩展的用户试验中进行评估，最终在公开音乐会演出中达到高潮。音乐表演实践中的许多变革源于少数人的创造力，但它们的影响取决于在更大的社区中的传播。社区建设在数字乐器研究中至关重要，该项目的成果将作为乐器创作的开放平台公开发布。一些最初的仪器设计将被创建，以鼓励探索和修改，所有的硬件和软件设计将在开源许可下发布。将提供详尽的文档，使研究人员和自学的黑客都能在项目持续时间之外使用该平台。

Digital musical instrument design presents several unique challenges in comparison to the design of most human-computer interfaces. For musical instruments, as for any tool for creative expression, the standards of success in a design are difficult to quantify, since standard HCI (human-computer interaction) metrics of accuracy and speed do not necessarily correlate with what musicians find expressive. More problematic still is the fluid and unpredictable relationship between designer and user. From the saxophone to the electric guitar to the turntable, musicians have been appropriating and even subverting instrument designs to produce music in ways the designer never anticipated. Some of the past century's most transformative changes in musical performance practice have arguably come from performers radically reinterpreting an instrument's capabilities and limitations. Digital musical instrument researchers therefore face a quandary: how can an interface be designed which embraces the user's wilful subversion of its original goals?This project will produce a design methodology and a hardware-software platform for the creation of 'hackable instruments': instruments which embrace the performer's reinterpretation and modification. This kind of end-user (mis)appropriation is currently more prevalent among acoustic and analogue electronic instruments than digital musical instruments. The typical computer music interface is designed such that arbitrary modification by non-experts is more likely to produce catastrophic failure than interesting results. Moreover, in comparison to acoustic instruments, whose operation is easy to understand, a lack of transparency in how a digital instrument works can discourage the performer from fully exploring its capabilities.User studies with musicians and instrument designers form the foundation of the project. The goal of these studies is to understand the exploration process musicians employ when adapting an instrument to their needs and to establish what features of an instrument design facilitate creative repurposing. In parallel, fundamental research on audio processing on embedded devices will lead to a hardware instrument platform that is robust to modification by the end user. Using this platform, several instrument designs will be created to test specific hypotheses about the factors promoting 'hackability' in an instrument. These designs will be evaluated in extended user trials which culminate in a public concert performance.Many of the transformative changes in musical performance practice originated with the creativity of a few individuals, but their impact depended on dissemination throughout a larger community. Community-building is critically important in digital musical instrument research, and the results of this project will be publicly distributed as an open platform for instrument creation. Several initial instrument designs will be created to encourage exploration and modification, and all hardware and software designs will be released under open-source licenses. Thorough documentation will be provided to enable researchers and self-trained hackers alike to make use of the platform well beyond the duration of the project.