The following are the individual components that make up the player interface, or "control surface." Each of the three voices consists of a pitch fader, an intensity fader and three sound selection buttons, as described below.

Faders

We chose a main visual interface of faders, much like those on a mixing console. This was done mainly to facilitate the use of a mouse, a design compromise described earlier. In the future, it is possible to change this element or augment it with something that takes advantage of the dataglove input. There are three groups of faders, one for each voice. Each group has a fader for pitch/speed (on the left) and intensity (on the right), for a total of six faders. Clicking on a fader with the mouse and simply dragging it up or down (on the VRML world's "Y" axis) will modify the sound in a way appropriate to that fader. Technically, the objects that are the faders have a plane sensor attached to them and the data from that sensor is routed back to the translation of that object, allowing it to move up and down. The translation data received from the plane sensor is used as the input to a vrmlScript, which does the appropriate calculation in order to scale it to the range needed for adjusting the volume and pitch of the sound in a correct way.

Sound selection buttons

In addition to the faders, each voice has three selection buttons used for switching between the available sounds. The left button in each group turns the voice off while the middle and right buttons select between the two sounds that have been mapped to that voice.

No labels

Much like a piano does not have labels on its keys, or a violin doesn't have its frets labeled, we've chosen to not put labels on the control surface of our instrument. Since it was an original design goal to produce something that can be practiced with the intention of becoming intimate with the instrument, it is assumed a player would, through repetition, memorize each element's function.

the control surface	with labels	as it appears in the model