The Sabotaging Piano: key-to-pitch remapping as a source of new techniques in piano improvisation

In this paper we present the Sabotaging Piano, a prepared electronic piano that alters key-to-pitch correspondence by reassigning adjacent pitches (i.e. one semi-tone higher or lower) to each key. Performers can control how many keys to remap through an expression pedal. If the pedal is not pressed the Sabotaging Piano works as a normal piano. When fully pressed, each key is remapped one semi-tone up or down with equal probability. Each new performance (i.e. when the piano is turned on) triggers a new and unknown remapping pattern, but the specific pattern remains fixed throughout the whole performance. This aims to provide a balance of uncertain but still explorable and learnable behaviour. We invited three professional piano improvisers to rehearse with our piano in order to prepare a final improvisation concert. We aimed to explore how much can be rehearsed or prepared with a piano that will behave somewhat differently for each new performance. We asked pianists to document their rehearsal processes to witness the appearing of strategies or techniques with the Sabotaging Piano. Through analysis of the rehearsals reports and the MIDI data collected in the final concert, here we show that the three pianists not only developed different techniques with the Sabotaging Piano, but they also leveraged the particularities of it to use them as creative resources

Transmitting Digital Lutherie Knowledge: The Rashomon Effect for DMI Designers

As the field around computer-mediated musical interaction drives attention to its sociotechnical, political and epistemological exigencies, it becomes important to be guided by disability studies, and for researchers and designers of accessible digital musical instruments (ADMIs) to foreground the lived experience of disabled musicians. This resonates with the movement to promote disability justice in HCI. In this paper, we introduce a case study of the design of a string-less guitar, which was developed in collaboration with a guitarist who lost his ability to play due to impairment. We present this work as an exploration of the Rashomon effect, a term that refers to the phenomenon of multiple witnesses describing the same event from their own perspective. We argue that the Rashomon effect is a useful way to explore how digital musical instrument (DMI) designers respond to NIME's interdisciplinarity, and to reflect on how we produce and transmit knowledge within our field

Self-Sabotage Workshop: a starting point to unravel sabotaging of instruments as a design practice

Within the music improvisation and jazz scenes, playing a wrong note may be seen as a source of creativity and novelty, where an initially undesired factor (the mistaken note) invites the musician to leverage their skills to transform it into new musical material. How does this idea, however, translate into more experimental scenes like NIME, where control and virtuosity are not necessarily the performance's aim? Moreover, within NIME communities the addition of randomness or constraints to musical instruments is often an intended aesthetic decision rather than a source of mistakes. To explore this contrast, we invited four NIME practitioners to participate in the Self-Sabotage Workshop, where each practitioner had to build their own sabotaging elements for their musical instruments and to give a short demonstration with them. We gathered participants' impressions of self-sabotating in a focus group, inquiring about control and musicality, and also the strategies they developed for coping with the self-sabotaged instruments. We discuss the emergent ideas of planned and unplanned sabotaging, and we propose a starting point towards the idea of self-sabotaging as a continuous design and musical process where designers/musicians try to overcome barriers that they impose upon themselves

Sabotaging Piano Concert

The Sabotaging Piano is an electronic prepared piano that challenges performers through the remapping of keys to unexpected pitches. For every new performance, a new remapping pattern is given, so performers face a continuously surprising new element. The performer is provided with an expression pedal (a ``sabotaging pedal'') to modulate the amount of keys that will we remapped, going from none to all of them