Expressive Interfaces

It might sound like bold statement, considering that is from someone who is not acquainted to music, but I believe that if we had to select a measure to judge the effectiveness of a musical interface, like a music instrument, expressiveness would be a much better criteria than not usability, ease-to-use or learn-ability.

I would add that one of the reasons -if not the most critical- why purely digital instruments haven't been able yet to replace the acoustic and electric counterparts, is because of the much richer gamma of sounds and moods that an analog instrument can convey, compared with those, perhaps cold and "static" (always the same, repeatable, predictable) of a digital instrument. With analog instruments, the possible sounds are virtually infinite and performances are always different. This is what I mean for expressiveness (beware, though, to take this just as an opinion and not a fact).

I would like to show you a couple of videos by the talented bass-soloist Marco Rodi. What I love of his style is that he is able to step "beyond" the boundaries of traditional bass performance, achieving a great level of expressiveness by fully interacting with his bass guitar as a whole and not only by stroking the strings and fingering on the tabs: for example, he raps on the bridge and he bends the neck of the guitar to create sound distortions. The videos are much more explicative than my words, so I simply suggest you to watch them. I said explicative, but perhaps I should have simply said expressive.