Musical Interaction Design with the CREATE USB Interface Teaching HCI with CUIs instead of GUIs

The CREATE USB Interface, or CUI, is a tool for both research and teaching that was developed to facilitate the design of new musical instruments and other interactive art projects. Teaching Human-Computer Interaction in music and related media arts presents a requirement for extremely responsive control methods, and a very different design theory than conventional HCI. A new course titled Media Interface Technology was developed in order to give students the necessary engineering expertise and aesthetic awareness to create successful input/output devices, and map their functionality onto musical synthesis or other interactive algorithms.