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The impact of scaling the production of a new interface for musical expression on its design: a story of L2Orkmotes

Published: 16 September 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The innovation in the new musical interfaces is largely driven by the ground up endeavors that introduce a level of redundancy. Inspired by the successes of iPhone and other industry innovations that were driven by iteration, consolidation, and scalability, we present a new interface for musical expression and discuss key elements of its implementation and integration into an existing and established laptop ensemble. In 2019, the Linux Laptop Orchestra of Virginia Tech (L2Ork) introduced the L2Orkmote, a custom reverse engineered variant of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk controller that reorganizes sensors and buttons using an additively manufactured housing. The goal was to equip each orchestra member with two of the newly designed L2Orkmotes, which resulted to the production of 40 L2Orkmotes. This large-scale production mandated software improvements, including the development of a robust API that can support such a large number of concurrently connected Bluetooth devices. Considering that new musical interfaces for musical expression (NIMEs) are rarely designed to scale, we report on the design. Additionally, we share the large-scale real-world deployment concurrently utilizing 28 L2Orkmotes, the supporting usability evaluation, and discuss the impact of scaling NIME production on its design.

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References

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Bukvic, Ivika, Martin, Thomas, Standley, Eric, & Matthews, Michael, 2010. "Introducing L2Ork: Linux Laptop Orchestra." In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, pp. 170--173.
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L2Ork at Virginia Tech, accessed on 26 April 2020. "Alien live scoring by L2Ork," Youtube. Accessed via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8GWuh5vC7I
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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      AM '20: Proceedings of the 15th International Audio Mostly Conference
      September 2020
      281 pages
      ISBN:9781450375634
      DOI:10.1145/3411109
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Published: 16 September 2020

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      Author Tags

      1. API
      2. controller
      3. laptop orchestra
      4. wearable
      5. wii remote

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      AM'20
      AM'20: Audio Mostly 2020
      September 15 - 17, 2020
      Graz, Austria

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      AM '20 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 47 submissions, 62%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 177 of 275 submissions, 64%

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