Modeling a Musician Performing on a Digital Musical Instrument as a Communications Channel

A musician performing on a digital musical instrument is modeled as a feed-forward communications channel. A variety of statements are made on the mutual information of the signals flowing through the model. For example, data processing can only reduce or retain mutual information, not increase it. It is suggested that instrument designers should consider creating high-fidelity musical instruments that generally avoid discarding information. Noise and many-to-one mappings have a tendency to decrease the mutual information, potentially reducing the fidelity of a digital musical instrument. Also, musicians need to rehearse their performances in order to avoid making noisier gestures. Overall, it is hoped that this paper and other related papers by the authors can show how to quantify information processing in user interfaces for continuous control.