Development and Evaluation of an Interface with Four-Finger Pitch Selection

摘要

This paper presents the development and evaluation of an interface for electronic musical instruments, designed for controlling monophonic synthesizers. The hand-held device allows the pitch selection with one hand, using four valve-like metal mechanics and three octave switches. Note events are triggered with a wooden excitation pad, operated with the second hand. The sensors are equipped with an advanced aftertouch, which enables expressive playing. In a user experiment, the controller is compared to a MIDI keyboard, regarding the reaction time and error rate in simple tasks. Results show no significant difference in the response time but a higher error rate for the novel interface. Outcome of this work is a list of necessary improvements and a plan for further experiments.