The Problem of the Second Performer: Building a Community Around an Augmented Piano

The design of a digital musical instrument is often informed by the needs of the first performance or composition. Following the initial performances, the designer frequently confronts the question of how to build a larger community of performers and composers around the instrument. Later musicians are likely to approach the instrument on different terms than those involved in the design process, so design decisions that promote a successful first performance will not necessarily translate to broader uptake. This article addresses the process of bringing an existing instrument to a wider musical community, including how musician feedback can be used to refine the instrument’s design without compromising its identity. As a case study, the article presents the magnetic resonator piano, an electronically augmented acoustic grand piano that uses electromagnets to induce vibrations in the strings. After initial compositions and performances using the instrument, feedback from composers and performers guided refinements to the design, laying the groundwork for a collaborative project in which six composers wrote pieces for the instrument. The pieces exhibited a striking diversity of style and technique, including instrumental techniques never considered by the designer. The project, which culminated in two concert performances, demonstrates how a new instrument can acquire a community of musicians beyond those initially involved. Composers often speak of the problem of the second performance: Many ensembles commission and perform new works, but fewer offer chances for pieces premiered elsewhere to be heard a second time. In the field of digital musical instrument (DMI) design, we instead encounter the problem of the second performer: Once a new instrument has been built and the first performances have been given, how can the designer establish a continuing role for the instrument in the broader musical community? Very few new instruments have attracted a significant following, with the result that an instrument’s designer is often its only performer and composer. Because designing an instrument is time-consuming, and many designers are constantly creating new instruments, even the most dedicated of designers will struggle to establish a musical presence for his or her creations. Sergi Jordà summarizes: “Many new Computer Music Journal, 36:4, pp. 10–27, Winter 2012 c © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. instruments are being invented. Too little striking music is being made with them” (Jordà 2004, p. 326). This article addresses the stage in DMI design following the creation of the first prototype and the presentation of the first performances. Our primary purpose is not to specify how a DMI should be initially designed or evaluated, a topic covered in many excellent articles (Wanderley and Orio 2002; Jordà 2004; Cook 2009; Paine 2009; Gurevich and Fyans 2011; O’Modhrain 2011). Rather, we examine the process of bringing an instrument to a larger community of musicians, sometimes changing its design in the process. As a case study, we present our recent work with composers and performers using the magnetic resonator piano, an electronically augmented acoustic grand piano which gives the pianist continuous control over the pitch, dynamics, and timbre of every note. The article concludes with general recommendations for DMI designers seeking to establish a continuing musical life for their instruments. 10 Computer Music Journal Piece or Instrument? Perry Cook advises DMI designers starting a project to “make a piece, not an instrument or controller” (Cook 2009, p. 218). DMI composer-designers have the unique luxury of being able to build the instrument to suit the needs of the piece, and this is indeed a common practice (Paine 2009). There are very good reasons to take this approach: Simply put, if an instrument is not useful to its creator, it is unlikely to be of use to anyone else. Jordà describes the instrument creation process as digital lutherie, a mix of science and art (Jordà 2004). When the lutherie process breaks down, it is just as often from lack of artistic planning as from technical failure: Most attendees of electronic music concerts have at some point experienced unsatisfying “knob-twiddling” performances stemming from inadequate musical planning (Schloss 2002). It seems reasonable, then, for DMI design to initially focus on producing the strongest possible musical result rather than the theoretically broadest capabilities. Musical communities are more easily formed around instruments than pieces, however. The DMI community includes many singular experts on their own creations, which have been carefully tailored to the creator’s artistic requirements. Though this is a perfectly acceptable arrangement, engaging other users involves allowing them to assert their own individuality on the instrument. Every common acoustic instrument affords the performer the ability to develop a personal expressive style, and a DMI too closely designed for the needs of a single piece may pose unacceptable constraints on other musicians. In the second stage, Cook rightly argues, DMI designers should consider ways to make the instrument less piece-specific and more generically useful. Musician-Focused Design Consider an alternative approach, taken either from the outset of a project or at the revision stage. Instead of designing for a specific piece, or even for an individual composer, the designer can take a user-centered approach, shaping the instrument to fit the perceived requirements of a community. Literature surveys, musician interviews, and community observation can produce a set of design goals which ideally result in a more generically useful instrument. One challenge in user-centered DMI design is that there are many potential stakeholders; the performer, the composer, the audience, the designer, and the manufacturer may each have different and sometimes contradictory perspectives on what constitutes a successful instrument (O’Modhrain 2011). For example, the easiest way to control a musical process may not be the one that gives the audience the clearest visual indication of cause and effect, the latter being highly important to a convincing performance (Schloss 2002). Moreover, a single individual may at different times occupy different roles. In particular, potential future DMI performers may begin as audience members, and if the instrument does not engage the audience, the opportunity for future collaboration may be lost. The Pitfall of Over-Determination Could user-centered DMI design in fact become counterproductive? Johan Redström argues that the very concept of a “user” is artificial, in that a person only becomes a user when there is a specific object to use (Redström 2006). Attempting to design for a particular set of usage scenarios risks “trapping people in a situation where the use of our designs has been over-determined and where there is not enough space left to act and improvise”(p. 129). Musicians frequently explore and repurpose devices in ways their designers did not anticipate; Redström cites the example of turntable use by DJs, one of many cases of repurposing throughout music history. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, when asked what market research went into the iPad, replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want” (New York Times 2011). Similarly, the performer’s primary job is to express himor herself using the instrument at hand. This job does not necessarily extend to imagining hypothetical future capabilities, though some performers also have a talent for this. McPherson and Kim 11 Particularly if we view digital lutherie as a mix of artistry and scientific research, the instrument designer can be well served to follow his or her own artistic intuition instead of trying to respond exclusively to the perceived needs of others. Our view, which we will examine in more depth in the case of the magnetic resonator piano, is that user feedback is critical to later stages of redesign and community-building; in the first stage, designing for a community of one is sufficient. (This is not to say pre-design user studies should never be conducted, only that the designer’s intuition has an important role to play in DMI creation.) To summarize our argument: Just build it, give it to musicians, and learn from what they do. The reason for this partly lies in the difference between how designers and new users explore the capabilities of an instrument. Affordances and Constraints Thor Magnusson examines DMI design from the twin perspectives of affordances and constraints (Magnusson 2010). An affordance can be defined as a system’s perceived capacity for a particular action. It is a property of the relationship between human and system: A musical instrument affords certain actions to a human player (dragging a bow across a string, pressing a piano key). The constraints of an instrument are its limitations, which may be obvious or subtle (no pitch bending on the piano, limited polyphony on the violin). When an instrument is designed around a piece, the designer is likely to consider affordances: The piece will set specific artistic goals, and the designer will find ways for the performer to achieve them. Subsequent performers and composers, however, will encounter a very different situation: The instrument will now be a fixed, complete object for which new music must be created. These musicians will explore the instrument’s set of capabilities with the goal of making it serve their own artistic ends. Each musician may arrive at a different, even idiosyncratic interpretation of the instrument’s affordances, but all musicians will be bound by essentially the same set of limitations, leading Magnusson to argue that “learning a digital musical instrument is therefore more appropriately described as ‘getting a feeling’ for the instrument’s constraints, rather than engaging with its affordances” (Magnusson 2010, p. 65) For some DMIs, however (especially augmented instruments building on traditional technique), performer skill is also an implicit constraint: Not all the techniques of an expert performer will be available to a novice. Nicolas Rasamimanana models the performer–instrument relationship as a “space of possibilities” defined by the intersections of instrument acoustics, general bio-mechanical limitations and the skills of an individual performer (Rasamimanana 2012, p. 218). Particularly promising for augmented instrument design is the set of gestures that are bio-mechanically possible and within the performer’s skill but that have no traditional acoustic function: In this case, the constraints of the traditional instrument can be relaxed to give the performer a wider expressive space to explore. Two performer studies on opposite ends of the complexity spectrum support Magnusson’s model of constraint exploration. Gurevich, Stapleton, and Marquez-Borbon (2010) asked musicians to develop a performance using an instrument consisting of a single button that played a fixed-frequency tone. The nine participants developed a striking diversity of techniques, and accidental discovery was found to be an important process in developing a personal style. Newton and Marshall (2011) developed a toolkit for performers to create their own augmented instruments. Instead of setting musical goals in advance, participants took an exploratory approach focused on limitations and permutations of the technology. We observed a similar process of constraint exploration in working with musicians on the magnetic resonator piano. Because constraints play such a crucial role in a new performer’s evaluation of an instrument, we argue that building a community around a DMI requires careful attention to constraints, especially to deciding which constraints can be relaxed in later design revisions. We can thus refine our argument above to: “Just build it. Musicians will do something unexpected with it anyway, so learn from what they do.” 12 Computer Music Journal Figure 1. Pianist Feifei