Affordances and constraints in screen-based musical instruments

The ixi software is an ongoing interdisciplinary research project. It focuses on the creation of screen-based interfaces as digital musical instruments. The notion of situated cognition is of particular interest as our findings are that an interface always contains compositional ideologies or mental models of musical intentions. The research involves the study of the determining nature of interfaces when used as tools for creative expression. This paper describes the problems of computer music in terms of HCI and discusses our findings in relation to affordances and constraints in screen-based digital instruments.