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Mapping the design space of intelligent musical instruments

Develop a taxonomy of intelligent musical instruments from published designs.

Level: Summer research, Honours, Masters
Prerequisites: Interest in musical instruments and design, and the ability to read research papers critically. COMP4350/COMP8350 or COMP3900/COMP6390 is a good background.

Intelligent musical instruments are now appearing regularly at conferences like NIME, and designers still lack a shared way to describe how they differ: where the AI sits, what it generates, what data it learns from, and how the performer relates to it. Existing taxonomies, such as Parkinson and Dunning’s taxonomy of musical interactions with machines, focus on improvisation rather than instrument design. In this project you’ll develop a taxonomy of intelligent musical instruments by systematically analysing published instruments, building on our work on opening the design space of intelligent instruments. The result is a framework that designers can use to find unexplored combinations.

• Summer or one semester: a coded dataset of published intelligent instruments from a bounded corpus (e.g., NIME and ICCC papers from 2018 onwards) and a first taxonomy.
• Two semesters or Master: validate the taxonomy by checking agreement with other lab coders (interviews with instrument designers would need ethics approval), and use it to identify and prototype one design from an unexplored region.

Tags: #theory #design-space #taxonomy #NIME #intelligent-instruments

How to apply

Contact Charles Martin with your CV, your unofficial transcript (if you are an ANU student), and a brief statement (200 words) explaining how you would approach this project. Before applying, read the Join page and our project expectations.