Bimanuality in Alternate Musical Instruments

This paper presents a study of bimanual control applied tosound synthesis. This study deals with coordination,cooperation, and abilities of our hands in musical context. Wedescribe examples of instruments made using subtractivesynthesis, scanned synthesis in Max/MSP and commercialstand-alone software synthesizers via MIDI communicationprotocol. These instruments have been designed according to amulti-layer-mapping model, which provides modular design.They have been used in concerts and performanceconsiderations are discussed too.