Development and Evaluation of an Interface with Four-Finger Pitch Selection

In this paper we present an interface for digital musical instruments which is primarily designed for playing mono-phonic melody synthesizers. The hand-held device allows the pitch selection with four valve-like metal mechanics and three octave switches. Note events are triggered with a wooden excitation pad, operated with the second hand. Another feature is the advanced aftertouch of the four me- chanics and the pad, which enables expressive playing. In a user experiment, the controller is compared to a classic MIDI keyboard, regarding the time needed for responding to simple visual stimuli and the mean error rate produced in that task. The results show no significant difference in the response time but a higher error rate for the novel in- terface for untrained users. Outcome of this work is a list of necessary improvements, as well as a plan for further experiments.