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

Dialogic Design of Accessible Digital Musical Instruments: Investigating Performer Experience

While it is accepted that accessible digital musical instruments (ADMIs) should be created with the involvement of targeted communities, participatory design (PD) is an unsettled practice that gets defined variously, loosely or not at all. In this paper, we explore the concept of dialogic design and provide a case study of how it can be used in the design of an ADMI. While a future publication will give detail of the design of this instrument and provide an analysis of the data from this study, in this paper we set out how the conversations between researcher and participant have prepared us to build an instrument that responds to the lived experience of the participant

Exploring Experiences with New Musical Instruments through Microphenomenology

This paper introduces micro-phenomenology, a research discipline for exploring and uncovering the structures of lived experience, as a beneficial methodology for studying and evaluating interactions with digital musical instruments. Compared to other subjective methods, micro-phenomenology evokes and returns one to the moment of experience, allowing access to dimensions and observations which may not be recalled in reflection alone. We present a case study of five micro-phenomenological interviews conducted with musicians about their experiences with existing digital musical instruments. The interviews reveal deep, clear descriptions of different modalities of synchronic moments in interaction, especially in tactile connections and bodily sensations. We highlight the elements of interaction captured in these interviews which would not have been revealed otherwise and the importance of these elements in researching perception, understanding, interaction, and performance with digital musical instruments