The Puara Framework: Hiding complexity and modularity for reproducibility and usability in NIMEs

This paper presents Puara, a framework created to tackle problems commonly associated with instrument design, immersive environments, and prototyping. We discuss how exploring Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) in a collaborative environment led to generalizing procedures that constitute a starting point to solve technical challenges when building, maintaining, and performing with instruments. These challenges guided the framework organization and focus on maintainability, integrability, and modularity. Puara was employed in self-contained systems using 3 % hard-to-implement DMI building blocks (network manager, gestural descriptors, Media Processing Unit) and supporting 3 established DMIs (GuitarAMI, T-Stick, Probatio) and one new instrument (AMIWrist). We validated Puara with two use cases where parts of the framework were used. Finally, we accessed the influence of frameworks when exploring predefined NIMEs without concern about the inner workings, or shifting composition paradigms between event-based and gesture-based approaches.