This is a talk about designing musical instruments and the delicate interplay of artistic and technical ways of thinking. All instruments, and especially digital ones, entail a balance between design and analysis, with instruments relying on symbolic or numerical models of music in order to create it, as exemplified in the venerable MIDI standard. However, no system is ever devoid of sociocultural context, and even the simplest technologies when examined in situ can exhibit fascinating complexity.
Physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad writes that, “language has been granted too much power.” McPherson would like to propose that as designers and researchers, we can let words about music take precedence over the messy and open-ended experience of making music, and that becoming overly preoccupied with language risks propagating clichés and reinforcing cultural stereotypes. Drawing on recent scholarship in human-computer interaction, and science and technology studies, McPherson will recount some alternative approaches and possible futures for designing music technology when technical and cultural factors are inextricably entangled. McPherson will illustrate these ideas with recent projects from the Augmented Instruments Laboratory, with a focus on rich bidirectional couplings between digital and analog electronics, acoustics, and human creative experience.
