What is Sound Sculpting ?

Sound Sculpting is a real-time design environment for Virtual Musical Instruments (VMI). It aims to enable design by a sound artist or musician of a musical instrument according to his or her wishes with the required or desired gestural and musical constraints instead of physically based constraints only. For the demo section in below video scroll to time 8:50.

How it works ...

The environment allows you to create, edit or perform sounds by changing parameters like position, orientation and shape of graphically displayed objects that can be programmed to behave in any manner desirable. Manipulation occurs with either one or both hands wearing datagloves.

How to use it ...

Thusfar, in the exploration of this world of new musical expression possibilities, VMIs have been created that behave like a rubber balloon or sheet and that control sound spatialization and timbre parameters. Particularly exciting is left-hand-only sound sculpting, which leaves the right hand free to play a keyboard, and the VMI replacing the standard keyboard modulation wheel and similar controllers.


See my list of publications for papers on Sound Sculpting.

This page was created in 1996 orso and last updated on 17 Aug 2022.