The Airborne Instruments nUFO – a Movement Based Musical Instrument

Abstract

The Airborne Instruments nUFO – NonTrivial UFO – is a new Digital Musical Instrument (DMI) that is designed to allow the musician completely free movement of the interactor object in space (airborne). Non-triviality (after H. v. Foerster) is mainly implemented through synthesis processes with a rich “inner life”, i.e. apparently intrinsic behavior, more akin to synthetic creatures than conventional instruments. The innovative Influx parameter mapping allows for a rich interaction with these processes with little or no training, making it suitable both for beginners that are enabled to create highly immersive sound worlds, and for experienced musicians in search for radically new physical approaches to digital synthesis.