Learning to play and perform on synthetic instruments

Centuries of experience with acoustic instruments means there is a body of knowledge about and under-standing of what can be done with a physical instru-ment, and this corpus of knowledge is refined and prop-agated through the interactions of teachers and pupils through the ages. That experience seems to have noth-ing to tell us about computer-created instruments and the one-off sounds for which such instruments are often designed, nor about the instrument’s sonic character, which itself is rarely explored, and certainly the intu-itive phrasing and shaping applied by a human player is not even attempted. We advocate in this paper a new research direction, linking computer science and mu-sical research, building on current activities in agent research and in performance knowledge, which could lead us to a new kind of electro-acoustic music, both in public performance and private listening.