Formuls: An Electronic Musical Instrument for Synthesis-Based Composition and Performance

A wealth of electronic instruments for composing and performing synthesis-based electronic music exist, offering the electronic musician the ability to readily synthesise practically any sound imaginable. Achievable through a wide range of audio-processing techniques, the electronic musician can layer sounds together and process them in almost innumerable ways during the creative process. But, suppose the musician wants to perform their music live. Tools that might be fit for the studio and the composition process may not necessarily lend themselves to live performance situations. Interface and interaction design, flexibility, portability, and cost can all impact how useful an instrument is in performance. This chapter discusses the fracture and reconciliation between composing and performing in my own creative practice, and the composition and performance system that emerged from the research. I present ‘formuls’, a bespoke software-based composition and performance environment that enables complex sound synthesis and audio-processing techniques to be controlled with an easy-to-use touchscreen interface. I discuss how formuls provides me with a solution to the musical problem of being able to control complex sound-processing parameters easily and perform the electronic music that I compose, the influence my personal creative approach has had on the development of the system, the compositions and performances that have been created with formuls, and the design considerations that have led me to achieve this.