A Quantitative Evaluation of the Differences between Knobs and Sliders

This paper presents a HCI inspired evaluation of simple physical interfaces used to control physical models. Specifically knobs and sliders are compared in a creative and exploratory framework, which simulates the natural environment in which an electronic musician would normally explore a new instrument. No significant difference was measured between using knobs and sliders for controlling parameters of a physical modeling electronic instrument. The reported difference between the tested instruments were mostly due to the sound synthesis models.