Requirements for a File Format for Smart Musical Instruments

Smart musical instruments are an emerging category of musical instruments characterized by sensors, actuators, wireless connectivity, and embedded intelligence. To date, a topic that has received remarkably little attention in smart musical instruments research is that of defining an interoperable file format for the exchange of content produced by this class of instruments. In this paper we preliminary investigate the design of a format specific to smart musical instruments but that at the same time enables interoperability with other devices. We adopted a participatory design methodology consisting of a set of interviews with studio producers. The purpose of such interviews was that of identifying a set of use cases for a format encoding data generated by smart musical instruments, with the end goal of gathering requirements for its design.