From Instruments One-Handed to One-Handed Instruments: A Comparative Approach Informed by Autoethnography

Dr Mat Dalgleish, Staffordshire University, UK

​Comparative methods involve looking at an object of study in relation to at least one another, usually to identify patterns of similarity and difference. Although no longer widely used in the study of music after the mid-20th Century, there has recently been some renewed musicological interest (Savage and Brown, 2013; Nagaraj et al., 2023), and comparative methods also feature in a number of design fields directly relavant to digital musical instrument (DMI) design. However, general despite consensus that DMIs fundamentally differ from earlier instrument types, comparative approaches have only rarely been employed by the NIME community (e.g. McPherson, 2018; McPherson et al., 2019). As far as can be identified, there have been no comparative studies of instruments for disabled players that consider new designs alongside established instruments (with or without adaptation).

Drawing on three decades of autoethographic experiences as a one-handed musician and two decades as a designer of new instruments, this paper compares and contrasts the trumpet, electric guitar, Eurorack synthesizer, and a self-designed NIME as one-handed instruments. A challenge in comparative research is that categories can be defined differently, but, adopting a broad categorisation based on underlying technology (Bongers, 2006; Hugill, 2004), these objects of study are examples of an acoustic musical instrument, an electric musical instrument, a commercial (original) electronic musical instrument, and a DMI, respectively. As well as covering the main categories of musical instruments in use today, this selection balances extensiveness of use by the author, and the trade-off between the number of objects studied and the number of variables compared.

By performing a step-by-step comparison of physical and perceived (socially constructed) properties it brings into focus suggestive similarities and contrasts among the objects of study in the context of one-handed use. These properties are drawn from the NIME literature and include access, immediacy, control, learning and mastery, sustainability, and reception issues. Several pronounced differences in real and perceived properties between categories and individual instrument types are observed, alongside some less pronounced differences and similarities between the categories.

The paper concludes with reflections on these differences in terms of the identity, purpose, and desirable properties of instruments for one-handed use, and their implications for adoption and long-term engagement. There are also a number of suggestions for future directions.


References

Bongers, B. (2006) Interactivation: Towards an e-cology of people, our technological environment, and the arts. PhD dissertation, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Hugill, A. (2004) The Orchestra: A User's Manual [online]. Available at: http://andrewhugill.com/OrchestraManual [Accessed 11 July 2024].

McPherson, A. (2018) Comparative Musical Instrument Design. Keynote presentation at the International Conference on Live Interfaces (ICLI), Porto, Portugal. June 14–16.

McPherson, A., Morreale, F., Harrison, J. (2019). Musical Instruments for Novices: Comparing NIME, HCI and Crowdfunding Approaches. In: Holland, S., Mudd, T., Wilkie-McKenna, K., McPherson, A., Wanderley, M. (eds) New Directions in Music and Human-Computer Interaction. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92069-6_12

Savage, P. and Brown, S. (2013). Analytical Approaches To World Music, 2(2), pp. 148-197.