The BazerBow: a multimodal exploration of mimetic design principles

The BazerBow was forged from mimetic design principles to engage the audience, often overlooked in digital musical instrument design. This thesis represents a line of enquiry to develop a set of mimetic design principles through a process of music practice and research. These principles pull from five prongs of a cycle of development: mimetic theories (Cox, 2016; Maes et al., 2014; Malloch and Trevarthen, 2009; Szalavitz and Perry, 2010), digital musical instrument design, mimetic design, prototyping of BazerBows and an examination of the prototypes. Mimetic theories were amalgamated with existing digital musical instrument design research to yield initial mimetic design principles. BazerBow prototypes were produced using these principles and then explored and tested to evaluate and improve the efficacy of the mimetic design. The test phase consisted of five performance sessions that included unique real-time response sliders, questionnaires, and post-performance discussions. The data analysis, including a novel Average Distribution Method, showed that the BazerBow prototype was imbued with mimetic potential eliciting a more significant mimetic response from the audience than a commercially available keyboard. The outcome of this thesis is a collection of mimetic design principles that offer a formative toolkit in guiding instrument design towards carefully considering audience response. In addition, the novel real-time slider method and ADM analysis could be easily adapted for use in other research contexts. Significantly, there has been no previous application of mimetic theories to DMI design or creation of design principles based on mimetic theory, so this constitutes new knowledge, contributing to existing digital musical instrument design. These mimetic design principles will be continually improved and tested in the future through this iterative process, imbuing new and exciting instruments with mimetic potential