Description
Sidney Fels, Linda Kaastra, Sachiyo Takahashi, Graeme McCaig · University of British Columbia · NIME 2004
Tooka is a tube with a mouthpiece at each end and a pressure sensor in the middle. Two players share the same closed column of air. One player alone cannot produce a controlled sound: pitch and dynamics come out of the pressure the two of them create together, while buttons under each player’s fingers shape the timbre. Players must agree, breath by breath, on what the instrument is doing.
The authors describe learning to play it as learning to coordinate with a partner rather than learning an interface. Pairs developed private conventions — a push to start a phrase, a release to end one — and the paper tracks the instrument’s evolution across versions as those conventions fed back into the design.
image: Fels, Kaastra, Takahashi & McCaig, “Evolving Tooka: from Experiment to Instrument”, NIME 2004 (CC BY 4.0)