Interactive Physical Design and Haptic Playing of Virtual Musical Instruments.

In Computer Music, a practical approach of many Digital Musical Instruments is to separate the gestural input stage from the sound synthesis stage. While these instruments offer many creative possibilities, they present a strong rupture with traditional acoustic instruments, as the physical coupling between human and sound is broken. This coupling plays a crucial role for the expressive musical playing of acoustic instruments; we believe restoring it in a digital context is of equal importance for revealing the full expressive potential of digital instruments. This paper first presents haptic and physical modelling technologies for representing the mechano-acoustical instrumental situation in the context of DMIs. From these technologies, a prototype environment has been implemented for both designing virtual musical instruments and interacting with them via a force feedback device, able to preserve the energetic coherency of the musician-sound chain.