Digital Lutherie and Expression for the Electronic Artist: A 2027 Retrospective and Prospectus
California Institute of the Arts
In development — CalArts practice-based thesis
Working position
The traditional sequence of digital instrument-making — specify, then program, then fabricate, then perform — has collapsed into a single iterative act that one practitioner can hold entirely in their head. This thesis takes the further-meta position on that collapse: not here is an instrument, and not here is how instruments get made, but what it means that the distance between wanting an instrument and having one has become this short, and what that does to the instruments themselves.
Retrospective is what has already been built; prospectus is what is being argued. Chaptered by the papers: Modern Digital Lutherie, Performance Practices, then the landscape — past and future.
1. What it binds
Three pieces of work that only mean something together.
DemiurgeOS is the operating layer: what it takes to make a Raspberry Pi behave like an instrument rather than a computer. A flashable, audio-first system with every major audio language pre-wired, a global clock, a hot-reloaded config, and a Rust supervisor that treats a dead stage as a routing problem rather than a crash.
Performance System of a Modern Digital Luthier is the instrument: what gets built on top of that layer. Csound with 63 effect modules across 20 menus, a Python interface, a Teensy control surface, 6 ms from string to amplifier, and a family of DIY satellites around it. Nothing onstage that could have been built instead.
Workflow of a Modern Digital Luthier is the methodology: the claim that the first two are instances of something general, argued through two case studies and grounded in the design literature that the NIME and ICMC communities have built over two decades.
2. Why the three compound
Demiurge exists because the instrument needed it. The instrument is one of the two case studies that made the methodology arguable. The methodology is what the other two mean when read together — which is not a thing either of them can say alone.
Each paper alone is a system description. The thesis is the argument they add up to.
3. Scope
The thesis argues from these three. BOUBA and NAM × Csound are the same season's work and can be cited as artifacts, but they are not load-bearing for the argument — BOUBA's user study in particular is evaluated by a methodology foreign to everything else here, and ships on its own timeline as its own paper.