The tools chosen by the traditional luthier are rooted in the physical craft of working
and shaping materials, forming the very physics of the instrument they build
But the new role of digital luthiers, designing digital musical instruments now require new,
very different tools.
My name is Nathan Renney, Im a PhD student at the University of West England and on behalf
of my co authors and I, I am presenting our paper Studying How Digital Luthiers Choose
Their Tools.
In this paper we analyse 27 interviews with prominent digital luthiers using reflexive
thematic analysis.
We generate themes titled The pragmatist, A product of our environment and Intentions.
Our work contributes to the literature on the designer tool relationship, most significantly,
adding to the understanding of how digital luthiers select the tools they use.
Our themes provide narratives that demonstrate designers' pragmatic rationalisation processes
and the impact of environmental influences, as well as how these problems relate to challenges
such as social creativity and meta-design.
To begin let us first contextualise the field of digital lutherie.
We can first consider the term luthier, defined as:
one who makes stringed musical instruments (such as violins or guitars)
For digital lutherie, the term luthier is borrowed to refer to someone who designs digital
instruments, rather than stringed instruments.
We see the adoption of this term through out the growing body of literature and suggest
that this developed from the usage of Buxton and in turn, Jorda and Bongers.
To briefly introduce the field of digital lutherie the NIME community provides an obvious
starting point.
With its origins as a workshop at the ACM conference CHI in 2001, it has since developed
into an annual conference particularly focused on new musical interface design.
Here and in many related conferences, we can see a rich field of research exploring digital
musical instruments (often referred to as DMI).
Of course, DMI exist beyond the fields of research and are quite literally changing
the way we make and perform music, with many new digital instruments produced at a variety
of scales, from controllers to entirely new standalone instruments.
We take the role of the digital luthier to be designing digital musical instruments,
but it is also important to consider that this role is a dynamic and fluid one.
Typically Digital luthiers often embrace a multifaceted role in this craft process, blurring
the boundary between designer, builder and player.
Jorda's thesis very much introduces the term in this context.
As Cheatle and Jackson put it, artists “. . . act as creative and critical users of tools – both
computational and otherwise – whose practice has the potential to reveal new insights and
understandings about the world in which we live...
”
In the field of digital lutherie we see that much of the existing research is very much
focused on this perspective, with instrument design being deeply coupled with the designer's
art.
But of course, some digital luthiers also work on commercial instruments, with a role
resembling that of a software or hardware engineer.
We also see digital luthiers making instruments as a mechanism for research itself.
This continuum of motivations and applications of the creation of DMI makes the role of digital
lutherie a very diverse and interesting area of HCI.
Given this how rich this field is, and motivated by the exploration of tools and programming
languages for creating new DMI, we set out to explore three research questions.
Why and how do Instrument designers pick their tools?
What distinct problem spaces do instrument designers consider to be involved in instrument
design?
How do instrument designers define a digital musical instrument?
To explore these questions we carried out open-ended interviews with 27 digital luthiers
using a purposeful sampling strategy.
The sampling strategy aimed to incorporate digital musical instruments with many modes
of interaction and motivations for instrument development.
Instruments included both open-source and proprietary instruments, with some instruments
representing a hybrid of the two (for example, an instrument with open-source software only).
Instruments also varied from bespoke instruments designed for an individual to instruments
intended for commercial mass-market production.
For more details on our methodology see our paper and reference to our prepublication.
We analysed interviews using reflexive thematic analysis, an approach to qualitative analysis
introduced by Braun and Clark.
This approach aimed to draw on the knowledge and experience of the research team to examine
and generate themes using multi-perspective reflexive practice.
In this study, two coders familiarized themselves with and coded the transcripts.
The research team met regularly to discuss and iterate around the analysis process.
This process resulted in around 900 codes, which we interactively explored in order to
produce increasingly refined themes relating to the research questions.
Through our thematic analysis we generated 3 shared narratives from participants experiences.
The first theme, The pragmatist considers the prevalent idea that tools are selected
for pragmatic reasons.
Participant 23 states:
"I think, my choice of language at that moment, I must say, it’s very pragmatic"
Whilst the attributes of tools varied, with examples such as good Performance, Interoperability,
Ease of use and availability being mentioned, participants largely shared the sense of making
their choices based on a cost benefit analysis of how the tool can solve their most prominent
design challenges.
We saw two sides to this pragmatic process, one focused on addressing technical issues
and another that addressed the limitations of the individual or team.
Smaller teams for example may bias towards tools that saved time, whereas a commercial
project with a team may prioritise maintainability.
Fundamentally, pragmatic choices tended to be the most immediate answer for participants
tool choices.
Our second theme explores the environmental influences that impact tool selection.
Participants demonstrated a clear awareness of how institutions such as schools or universities
or communities such as online forums and industry influence the tools they use.
Digital luthiers appear to have a clear and unique social and cultural environment in
which they work, composed of the communities they engage with.
This environment provides a set of pressures that influence tool choice by preserving an
intuitive sense of the affordances and constraints that a tool presents.
This gives rise to common terms such as 'Industry standard' which interestingly extends beyond
just commercial digital luthiers.
Our final theme focuses on how the intended use for the instrument being designed also
steers the selection of the tools used to create it.
This shared narrative includes many different requirements and accounts for the unique factors
of each instrument and the constraints they place on tool selection.
Despite this, we see some very prevalent requirements emerge, such as the need to facilitate social
creativity.
We see this demonstrated in the capacity for teams to collaborate often in the case of
research, commercial or open source design, however individuals also often require social
creativity through ongoing feedback during the design process.
Given the intended outcome for an instrument is to be played, often digital luthiers choose
tools to facilitate channels of feedback and interactivity with users.
To conclude this study we discuss our findings in the context of Stolterman and Pierces work,
demonstrating further complexity in digital luthiers espoused theory and theory in use.
We also contextualise the field of digital lutherie as rich and mature examples of social
creativity and meta-design and suggest we can look to digital lutherie to further explore
these ideas.
Due to the time limitations in this presentation, we encourage you to read our paper and also
add that our transcripts and resources have been made accessible to help support future
work in this area.
Thanks for listening.