Game|lan:Co-Designing and Co-Creating an Orchestra of Digital Musical Instruments within the Fab Lab Network

Abstract

This paper presents an ongoing project focused on the co-design and co-creation of a small orchestra of digitally fabricated digital musical instruments (DMIs) based on the Bela board, an open-source embedded computing platform. The project took place in Fab Labs, an international network of digital fabrication laboratories1. The orchestra, named Game|Lan, is inspired by the traditional Indonesian Gamelan ensembles, their music and philosophy. The project aims to explore the capabilities of the Fab Lab network which runs on an open-access, open-source and open-hardware ethos, for a distributed project of this type. The aspiration is to create an original orchestra for non-musicians, which offers the rich collective experience of being in a music group and explore it as a medium for social interaction. This paper presents the first results of the research project which took place is three Fab Labs in South America and it focuses on the process and the development of the project.