LIMITER is a new musical instrument designed to incorporate game-like elements into an interface for justly intonated and microtonal composition and performance.
Play is a fundamental element of human experience, and has been shown to have highly positive effects on development, mental health, and creativity. Despite this, there are surprisingly few musical experiences that incorporate gamified elements directly into the performance and composition process itself. Additionally, the concept of microtonal music, while being mainstream in musical cultures outside of the West, remains an esoteric and niche concept to Western audiences, largely reserved for experimental composers.
LIMITER overcomes this problem by allowing the user to combine the experience of playing a 80s arcade machine with full justly intonated expression, offering the ability to swap tuning systems on the fly and play complexly tuned chords, but packaged in an interface that feels familiar and intuitive. With LIMITER, the musician uses the simple controls of a button and joystick to create and communicate these chords visually in a way that abstracts the mathematical operations, but remains clear and highly expressive both to both the audience and performer. It offers a novel system of visual composition that allows amateurs and experienced musicians alike the ability to control these microtonal chords, thus synthesizing a gamified musical interface and a conduit for clearly visualizing alternate tuning systems into one creativity-enhancing system.
Through harnessing these techniques, LIMITER offers the opportunity to discover new soundsand give audiences and performers new types of musical experiences.