About this episode

Victor Zappi discusses the design and future of digital musical instruments and his work in music technology.

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!

People in this episode

Host: Jan Wilczek

Guest: Victor Zappi

Topics covered

• digital musical instruments
• music technology
• interaction design
• audio programming
• hackable hardware
• musical interfaces

Keywords

• digital musical instruments
• music technology
• interaction design
• audio device control
• hackable hardware
• LDSP C++ framework

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Northeastern University, Queen Mary University of London, Centre for Digital Music

Products: Bela hardware platform, LDSP C++ framework

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