This speculative paper proposes a terminology of ergomimesis for engaging with the way new musical instruments derive their design from previous music technologies. What new instruments translate from earlier technologies are not simply the simulation of an interface, but a whole constellation of embodied contexts, where trained movements, musical actions, human-instrument relationships and other processes are translated to a technology of a different material substratum (from the organic to the digital material). The concept of ergodynamics in a musical instrument is subsequently contextualised in relation to the semiotics of mapping, from the background of the Peircian analysis of the sign
