Digital musical instruments yielding force feedback were designed and employed in a case study with the Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana. The advantages of force feedback are illuminated through the creation of a series of musical compositions. Based on these and a small number of other prior music compositions, the following compositional approaches are recommended: providing performers with precise, physically intuitive, and reconfigurable controls, using traditional controls alongside force-feedback controls as appropriate, and designing timbres that sound uncannily familiar but are nonetheless novel. Video-recorded performances illustrate these approaches, which are discussed by the composers. IntroductionApplications of force feedback for designing musical instruments have been studied since as early as 1978 at ACROE [14,17,21,36] (Chap. 8 reports on recent advancements). Such works provide a crucial reference for understanding the role that haptic technology can play in music, and these are described in detail in a preceding chapter. The wider computer music community has demonstrated a sustained interest in incorporating force-feedback technology into musical works and projects. This has been evidenced by a series of projects during recent decades.

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Regulatory geographic datasets that inform citizen’s lives are, in general, responsive to engaged search and visual, attentive browsing, but are not designed for directly informing the lived context. The density of sensors and software interfaces present in mobile devices allows for integration of these resources with contextual applications. ToxSampler is an iOS application that modifies the immediate environmental audio scene with associated data from the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. The application applies digital signal processing (DSP) to the microphone signal based upon the location of the participant and associated TRI data releases. The system, as a result, affords an informed awareness of the datascape through an immediate augmentation of the sensed setting.

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