Ephemeral instruments
This work addresses the design and adaptation of digital musical instruments for musicians and designers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing discourse without introducing new methods or data.
The article challenges the traditional emphasis on longevity in digital musical instrument (DMI) design, arguing that ephemerality is an intrinsic aspect due to tools, performance conditions, and music nature, and proposes integrating both longevity and ephemerality to inform DMI design and learning.
This article questions the notion of ephemerality of digital musical instruments (DMI). Longevity is generally regarded as a valuable quality that good design criteria should help to achieve. However, the nature of the tools, of the performance conditions and of the music itself may lead to think of ephemerality as an intrinsic modality of the existence of DMIs. In particular, the conditions of contemporary musical production suggest that contextual adaptations of instrumental devices beyond the monolithic unity of classical instruments should be considered. The first two parts of this article analyse various reasons to reassess the issue of longevity and ephemerality. The last two sections attempt to propose an articulation of these two aspects to inform both the design of the DMI and their learning.