Crafting Experience : Designing Digital Musical Instruments for Long-Term Use in Artistic Practice

Sammanfattning: This thesis collects a series of publications that all present work where digital musical instruments (DMIs) played a central role. While the papers focus on the individual projects where the DMIs where created, the first part of this thesis describes patterns and insights arrived at by comparing the projects and the DMIs, as well as discuss them in the context of other contemporary research.The projects described in the included papers all are quite different, but the role I performed in them was consistent in many ways. I position my- self as a craftsperson, and trace the practice of crafting digital musical instru- ments through the projects. As a working metaphor, I present the idea of the DMI-craftsperson as a translator between different domains. This requires a broader outlook than the mechanics of the instruments themselves, including some working understanding of the domains that the DMI interacts with.The relationship between DMIs and contemporary musical practice is a thread that runs through the work. I criticise the practice of exclusively performing laboratory based evaluations, and the concept of rigid and requirements based evaluations of artistic artefacts. Instead, I argue, relying on Sonic Interaction Design and embodied aesthetics, that the complexities and nuances of perfor- mance can only be fully explored by engaging in long-term artistic practice.