New Musical Instrument Design Considerations

This article discusses the proliferation of new musical instruments and interfaces for computer-based music performance (digital musical instruments). It discusses the notion of a musical instrument schema and how preexisting musical practice can be used to provide design guidelines for this developing field. In so doing, it teases out notions of control and creation and discusses a number of theoretical positions for those notions in musical performance. The author provides a model for musical interface design and discusses it in terms of a large online database of digital musical instruments he has created.