Tabula

Tabula is the deformable musical interface I designed and built for my master’s thesis. It uses high-resolution 3D hall-effect sensing to capture fine motor skill, and entangles multiple sound parameters into a single deforming device, so that one gesture reshapes several dimensions of sound at once.

The project grew out of a frustration: after years of playing electric guitar, producing electronic music felt closer to video editing than to playing an instrument. Tabula asks what it would take for a digital instrument to carry the same continuous, physical expressiveness as bending a guitar string.

I built and tested Tabula through a co-creation design process, using it to answer a question I needed to answer concretely rather than theoretically: what does musical expressivity actually mean for an interface like this? The definition that came out of the work is a case study specific to deformable interfaces, not a universal one, but it’s one I can defend, because I built and tested the thing myself.