What is Nemmi?
NEMMI stands for Non-Emulative Mobile Musical Instrument and is the project of Alexandre Clément, Digital Media Ph.D. candidate at FEUP.
Mobile musical instruments are abundant in the mobile app stores, but most either attempt to emulate traditional musical instruments or approach their interaction and interface design with very specific methods. There is no such thing as a uniformized way of interacting and controlling musical instruments on handheld devices, especially one that is designed with the particularities of those devices in mind.
The NEMMI project is an attempt to exactly that: design a mobile musical instrument that is anchored in user-experience and developed with handheld device operation and specificities in mind. The culmination of this project will be released as a standalone application for both Android and iOS systems.
Nemmi Prototypes
While developing this project, and before being able to reach a finalized digital musical instrument, several prototypes were created in order to test and evaluate different things. With the prototypes came the need to distinguish them, and so the nomenclature NemmiProtoX was adopted (no particular reason for that, just sounded good).
ProtoUno
This prototype was developed in order to study how users would appropriate the mobile device and represent musical parameters through common control gestures.
It was used to develop a testing protocol and run a small-scale experiment, in which we tried to understand how users instinctively mapped Note Onset, Note Pitch, Note Duration and Note Amplitude. Results of the experiment were presented in a paper entitled "Musical Control Gestures in Mobile Handheld Devices: design guidelines informed by daily user experience".
Published on 06/21 in MDPI Special Issue Musical Interactions
NemmiProtoDue
This prototype was developed in order to evaluate the impact of aditional feedback (i.e. visual and haptic) in musical task performance.
This experiment is concluded and is in the process of publishing found data.
NemmiProtoTre
This prototype implements all results gathered from previous experiments into a fully functional prototype, allowing experiment participants to develop their own instruments within defined interaction methods and guidelines. Participants will be able to develop their own instruments using Pure Data (vanilla) and integrate them into the prototype for standalone use.
This experiment will start in early December and run until mid-January.
If you want to participate in this experiment fill this form or contact me using the button below.
