Designing Digital Musical Instruments with Victor Zappi | WolfTalk #029

Victor Zappi is a creator, researcher, and educator at the intersection of music, technology, and interaction design. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Music Technology at Northeastern University. In his career, among others, he worked on the Bela hardware platform during his time at Queen Mary University of London’s prestigious Centre for Digital Music (C4DM).

In this episode, apart from Victor’s inspiring career, we focus on digital musical instruments:

• What is a “good” digital musical instrument like?
• Is it a fixed “box” that you should learn how to play?
• Or should it be “abused” by opening “the box,” and messing with its internals?
• Can an artist change the digital instrument to make it their own?

We conclude with a discussion of Victor’s LDSP C++ framework, which enables low-level audio device control on Android devices.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of musical interfaces, hackable hardware, and the technology that drives them!