The author presents Probatio, a toolkit for building functional DMI
(digital musical instruments) prototypes, artifacts in which gestural
control and sound production are physically decoupled but digitally
mapped. He uses the concept of instrumental inheritance, the application
of gestural and/or structural components of existing instruments to
generate ideas for new instruments. To support analysis and combination,
he then leverages a traditional design method, the morphological chart,
in which existing artifacts are split into parts, presented in a visual
form and then recombined to produce new ideas. And finally he integrates
the concept and the method in a concrete object, a physical prototyping
toolkit for building functional DMI prototypes: Probatio. The author's
evaluation of this modular system shows it reduces the time required to
develop functional prototypes.
The book is useful for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students
in the areas of musical creativity and human-computer interaction, in
particular those engaged in generating, communicating, and testing ideas
in complex design spaces.