Daniel Trueman

Scordatura, or “mis-tuning” as applied to stringed musical instruments, subverts the embodied physical connection, hard-earned through years of practice, between body and sound. This mis-tuning and the musical instruments themselves serve as powerful models for building new digital instruments that leverage and renew these hard-earned skills. Through an iterative process of conceiving and building new digital instruments (in both hardware and software), this project engages a number of important questions concerning instrument design, the body, and musical expression. Central to this process of digitizing, through code, our ideas about how instruments work is a productive tension between qualitative and quantitative approaches to understanding musical instruments and musical bodies.