Instrumental Agency and the Co-Production of Sound: From South Asian Instruments to Interactive Systems

What is it about?

This paper focuses on the experience of playing a musical instrument and how much that instrument's design and materials can impact you, as the player. In order to examine this phenomenon, we looked specifically at sympathetic strings, commonly found in South Asian string instruments, as a study case. These strings are rarely played directly by the musician, but rather they sound sympathetically, as a secondary, indirect sounding source within the instrument. In a series of two studies, we asked musicians questions surrounding perceived control over these strings, and how much perceived influence is felt by these strings.

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Photo by Saubhagya gandharv on Unsplash

Photo by Saubhagya gandharv on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The study of player-instrument interaction is often focused on new digital interactive systems and rarely traditional acoustic instruments. This research provides a novel perspective on this study by looking at instruments from different musical cultures. This resituates the player-instrument interaction conversation to a broader, more global landscape to include instruments of all types (digital, electronic, or acoustic), from all time periods, and all corners of the world.