Insights into how digital luthiers approach design

Renney, Nathan; Gaster, Benedict R

Abstract

The design of digital musical instruments represents a complex role that incorporates creative practice, design and engineering. It is, of course, a deep discussion topic and research focus within the NIME community. This paper discusses how digital luthiers approach design through a reflexive thematic analysis that inductively explores their practice. This work builds on a study that includes interviews with 27 digital luthiers from various backgrounds and varied motivations, originally motivated to better understand tool use in digital lutherie. The themes presented provide constructed narratives that affirm assumptions that intuitively appear likely and provide interesting insights and developments for further exploration that are fitting and relevant to the NIME community. This discussion finds nuances in how digital luthiers approach design as a problem and in search of inspiration. It also explores how interaction and control are often the primary focus of digital luthiers and that they emphasise opinionated and directed design choices. These ideas are then considered in relation to existing ideas from the field.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: New Interfaces for Musical Expression
• Start Date: Sep 4, 2024
• End Date: Sep 6, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Sep 4, 2024
• Publication Date: Sep 4, 2024
• Deposit Date: Sep 13, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 13, 2024
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Series ISSN: 2220-4806
• Book Title: Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression
• Keywords: Author Keywords NIME, Design, DMI, Digital Lutherie, Thematic Analysis CCS Concepts; Applied computing → Sound and music computing;; Human- centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/12888290
• Publisher URL: https://www.nime.org/archives/