Two concepts are presented, extended, and unified in this paper: mobile device augmentation towards musical instruments design and the concept of hybrid instruments. The first consists of using mobile devices at the heart of novel musical instruments. Smartphones and tablets are augmented with passive and active elements that can take part in the production of sound (e.g., resonators, exciter, etc.), add new affordances to the device, or change its global aesthetics and shape. Hybrid instruments combine physical/acoustical and "physically informed" virtual/digital elements. Recent progress in physical modeling of musical instruments and digital fabrication is exploited to treat instrument parts in a multidimensional way, allowing any physical element to be substituted with a virtual one and vice versa (as long as it is physically possible). A wide range of tools to design mobile hybrid instruments is introduced and evaluated. Aesthetic and design considerations when making such instruments are also presented through a series of examples.
The Faust Synthesis ToolKit is a set of virtual musical instruments written in the Faust programming language and based on waveguide algorithms and on modal synthesis. Most of them were inspired by instruments implemented in the Synthesis ToolKit (STK) and the program SynthBuilder. Our attention has partly been focused on the pedagogical aspect of the implemented objects. Indeed, we tried to make the Faust code of each object as optimized and as expressive as possible. Some of the instruments in the Faust-STK use nonlinear allpass filters to create interesting and new behaviors. Also, a few of them were modified in order to use gesture data to control the performance. A demonstration of this kind of use is done in the Pure Data program. Finally, the results of some performance tests of the generated C + + code are presented.
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