Music with Digital Musical Instruments

The Authenticity Angle

In Higher Order Gestalt Fromage, the deliberate dissolution of the gesture-sound causal link — from first-order surrogacy toward remote surrogacy while the performers’ bodies remain visible — stages the estrangement that results. The piece asks what the causal link was doing for authenticity by systematically removing it, within a co-present setting where the performers’ physical presence is never in question, only the legibility of their agency.

This thread also built the research infrastructure — the T-Stick ecosystem, the T-Stick Music Creation Project (TMCP), the T-Patch software — and established the vocabulary (gestural surrogacy, gesture vocabulary development) that informs the later threads. The DMI strand is the root of the authenticity question: it named it explicitly in the HOGF program note (NIME 2021).

Key Concepts

• Gestural surrogacy — Denis Smalley’s continuum between action and sound, from first-order (gesture directly causes sound) to remote surrogacy (no recoverable causal link). The T-Stick makes this continuum compositionally navigable.
• The second performer problem — when a DMI creator can no longer perform the instrument themselves, the knowledge transfer to a second performer exposes what was tacit in the original design. This is both a practical challenge and a test of the instrument’s longevity.
• DMI roles taxonomy — actuator, modulator, data provider: a classification of how digital instruments function in ensemble contexts.
• Demonstration content as pedagogy — compositions written for a DMI serve as pedagogical infrastructure, teaching future performers the instrument’s idiomatic vocabulary.