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Discourse is critical: Towards a collaborative NIME history
Abstract
Recent work in NIME has questioned the political and social implications of work in this field, and has called for direct action on problems in the areas of diversity, representation and political engagement. Though there is motivation to address these problems, there is an open question of how to meaningfully do so. This paper proposes that NIME’s historical record is the best tool for understanding our own output but this record is incomplete, and makes the case for collective action to improve how we document our work.
I begin by contrasting NIME’s output with its discourse, and explore the nature of this discourse through NIME history and examine our inherited epistemological complexity. I assert that, if left unexamined, this complexity can undermine our community values of diversity and inclusion. I argue that meaningfully addressing current problems demands critical reflection on our work, and explore how NIME’s historical record is currently used as a means of doing so. I then review what NIME's historical record contains (and what it does not), and evaluate its fitness for use as a tool of inquiry. Finally I make the case for collective action to establish better documentation practices, and suggest features that may be helpful for the process as well as the result.
... In this sense, we align with Calegario and colleagues [9] on the importance of adequately documenting DMIs to make them accessible projects. Withih the NIME literature reflecting on documentation Bin's [3] work is particularly relevant as it proposes practical parameters to develop effective NIME documentation (Collaborative, Ongoing, Flexible, Open, and Complete). While we embrace this model, in our workshop it emerges the difficulty to produce documentation due to people's inexperience (subtheme 2.1). ...
Sustainable NIME practices have gained significant atten-
tion in the past few years. This article further develops this
perspective by proposing a set of strategies for sustainable
digital fabrication processes, which is an important aspect of
Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) creation. We grounded
our strategies on recent literature presented at NIME com-
bined with state-of-the-art literature and policy on sustain-
able products. To start understanding how these strategies
could be perceived and adopted by DMI makers, we run a
workshop at iii (Instruments Inventors Initiative) - an incu-
bator of musicians/makers. In the workshop we discussed
some of these strategies in order to understand how they
resonated with our participants. The article concludes by
positioning our contributions within the broader context of
research within the NIME community and related fields, of-
fering a perspective on how these strategies might influence
sustainable practices in DMI production.
... In the context of music, several authors have called for increased sensitivity to the social and ethical frameworks in which the applications are being developed (e.g. [4,5,10,28,40,48]. As Friedman and Nissenbaum were early to warn [24], a lack of diversity and richness of context in the development phase can have serious and widespread consequences in society. ...
Engineering communities that feed the current proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) have historically been slow to recognise the spectrum of societal impacts of their work. Frequent controversies around AI applications in creative domains demonstrate insufficient consideration of ethical predicaments, but the abstract principles of current AI and data ethics documents provide little practical guidance. Pragmatic methods are urgently needed to support developers in ethical reflection of their work on creative-AI tools.
In the wider context of value sensitive, people-oriented design, we present an analytical method that implements an ethically informed and power-sensitive stakeholder identification and mapping: Ethically Aligned Stakeholder Elicitation (EASE). As a case study, we test our method in workshops with six research groups that develop AI in musical contexts. Our results demonstrate that EASE supports critical self-reflection of the research and outreach practices among developers, discloses power relations and value tensions in the development processes, and foregrounds opportunities for stakeholder engagement. This can guide developers and the wider NIME community towards ethically aligned research and development of creative-AI.
... However, the sustainability and continuity of these socio-technical structures depend on the active mutual engagement of the members of the CoP, who contribute and structure the knowledge that is being shared, and maintain the technical infrastructure (e.g., the hosting of an online repository), in this sense, a centralised resource such as SensorWiki.org [46] can potentially become a beacon for a whole community with a joint enterprise. Furthermore, community engagement can also be reinforced by doing ...
Latin American (LATAM) contributions to Music Technology date back to the early 1940’s. However, as evidenced in historical analyses of NIME, the input from LATAM institutions to its proceedings is considerably low, even when the conference was recently held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Reflecting on this visible disparity and joining efforts as a group of LATAM researchers, we conducted a workshop and distributed a survey with members of the LATAM community with the aim of sounding out their perspectives on NIME-related practices and the prospect of establishing a LATAM NIME Network. Based on our findings we provide a contemporary contextual overview of the activities happening in LATAM and the particular challenges that practitioners face emerging from their socio-political reality. We also offer LATAM perspectives on critical epistemological issues that affect the NIME community as a whole, contributing to a pluriversal view on these matters, and to the embracement of multiple realities and ways of doing things.
This article explores two in-depth interviews with distinguished Chinese NIMEers,
across generations, from the late 1970s to the present. Tian Jinqin and Meng Qi
represent role models in the Chinese NIME community. From the innovative NIME
designers’ historical technological innovation of the 1970s’ analog ribbon control
string synthesizer Xian Kong Qin to the 2020’s Wing Pinger evolving harmony
synthesizer, the author shines a light from different angles on the Chinese NIME
community.
We present TRAVIS II, an augmented acoustic violin with touch
sensors integrated into its 3D printed fingerboard that track lefthand
finger gestures in real time. The fingerboard has four strips
of conductive PLA filament which produce an electric signal
when fingers press down on each string. While these sensors are
physically robust, they are mechanically assembled and thus
easy to replace if damaged. The performer can also trigger
presets via four FSRs attached to the body of the violin. The
instrument is completely wireless, giving the performer the
freedom to move throughout the performance space. While the
sensing fingerboard is installed in place of the traditional
fingerboard, all other electronics can be removed from the
augmented instrument, maintaining the aesthetics of a traditional
violin. Our design allows violinists to naturally create music for
interactive performance and improvisation without requiring
new instrumental techniques. In this paper, we describe the
design of the instrument, experiments leading to the sensing
fingerboard, and performative applications of the instrument.
So far, NIME research has been mostly inward-looking, dedicated to divulging and studying our own work and having limited engagement with trends outside our community. Though musical instruments as cultural artefacts are inherently political, we have so far not sufficiently engaged with confronting these themes in our own research. In this paper we argue that we should consider how our work is also political, and begin to develop a clear political agenda that includes social, ethical, and cultural considerations through which to consider not only our own musical instruments, but also those not created by us. Failing to do so would result in an unintentional but tacit acceptance and support of such ideologies. We explore one item to be included in this political agenda: the recent trend in music technology of "democratising music", which carries implicit political ideologies grounded in techno-solutionism. We conclude with a number of recommendations for stimulating community-wide discussion on these themes in the hope that this leads to the development of an outward-facing perspective that fully engages with political topics.
Nearly two decades after its inception as a workshop at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , NIME exists as an established international conference significantly distinct from its precursor. While this origin story is often noted, the implications of NIME's history as emerging from a field predominantly dealing with human-computer interaction have rarely been discussed. In this paper we highlight many of the recent-and some not so recent-challenges that have been brought upon the NIME community as it attempts to maintain and expand its identity as a platform for multidisciplinary research into HCI, interface design, and electronic and computer music. We discuss the relationship between the market demands of the neoliberal university---which have underpinned academia's drive for innovation---and the quantification and economisation of research performance which have facilitated certain disciplinary and social frictions to emerge within NIME-related research and practice. Drawing on work that engages with feminist theory and cultural studies, we suggest that critical reflection and moreover mediation is necessary in order to address burgeoning concerns which have been raised within the NIME discourse in relation to methodological approaches, 'diversity and inclusion', 'accessibility', and the fostering of rigorous interdisciplinary research.
We present Olly, a musical textile tangible user interface (TUI) designed around the observations of a group of five children with autism who like music. The intention is to support scaffolding social interactions and sensory regulation during a semi-structured and open-ended playful activity. Olly was tested in the dance studio of a special education needs (SEN) school in NorthEast London, UK, for a period of 5 weeks, every Thursday afternoon for 30 minutes. Olly uses one Bare touch board in midi mode and four stretch analog sensors embedded inside four elastic ribbons. These ribbons top the main body of the installation which is made by using an inflatable gym ball wrapped in felt. Each of the ribbons plays a different instrument and triggers different harmonic chords. Olly allows to play pleasant melodies if interacting with it in solo mode and more complex harmonies when playing together with others. Results show great potentials for carefully designed musical TUI implementation aimed at scaffolding social play while affording self-regulation in SEN contexts. We present a brief introduction on the background and motivations, design considerations and results.
This paper discusses practice-based research in the context of live performance with interactive systems. Practice-based research is outlined in depth, with key concepts and approaches contextualised with respect to research in the NIME field. We focus on two approaches, both of which are concerned with documenting, examining and reflecting on the real-world behaviours and experiences of people and artefacts involved in the creation of new works. The first approach is primarily based on reflections by an individual performer/developer (auto-ethnography) and the second on interviews and observations. The rationales for both approaches are presented along with findings from research which applied them in order to illustrate and explore the characteristics of both. Challenges, including the difficulty of balancing rigour and relevance and the risks of negatively impacting on creative practices are articulated, as are the potential benefits.
Digital culture is a mainstay of the emerging 6V era as both the digitization of existing cultural data and the creation of original native digital cultural content directly lead to the generation of large data volumes which may well be bursty, unstructured or semi-structured, and inherently multimodal. One way to address the increased complexity associated with 6V data is to create metadata structures which succinctly summarize a segment of the underlying cultural data, add semantic information, and serve as indexing and clustering points. This conference paper proposes a JSON description for cultural items which is tailored to the needs of the digital culture domain, generic enough to summarize the vast majority of cultural items, and flexible enough to be extended should the need arise. Moreover, it supports by construction multilevel clustering, semantic annotations, and links to and from relevant cultural items. As a concrete example, the proposed description has been imported to an instance of a Neo4j graph database. The latter takes full advantage of the capabilities offered by the proposed JSON metadata structure, especially the dynamic directed linking between similar cultural items. The abovementioned Neo4j is populated with cultural items from the Ionian Islands, a Greek region with rich cultural tradition.
In this paper, we present a workshop of physical computing applied to NIME design based on science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) education. The workshop is designed for master students with multidisciplinary backgrounds. They are encouraged to work in teams from two university campuses remotely connected through a portal space. The components of the workshop are prototyping, music improvisation and reflective practice. We report the results of this course, which show a positive impact on the students' confidence in prototyping and intention to continue in STEM fields. We also present the challenges and lessons learned on how to improve the teaching of hybrid technologies and programming skills in an interdisciplinary context across two locations, with the aim of satisfying both beginners and experts. We conclude with a broader discussion on how these new pedagogical perspectives can improve NIME-related courses.
The idea of discipline opens up a nexus of meaning. Disciplines discipline disciples.1 A commitment to a discipline is a way of ensuring that certain disciplinary methods and concepts are used rigorously and that undisciplined and undisciplinary objects, methods and concepts are ruled out. By contrast, ideas of interdisciplinarity imply a variety of boundary transgressions, in which the disciplinary and disciplining rules, trainings and subjectivities given by existing knowledge corpuses are put aside. In this introduction we interrogate the current preoccupation with interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, in particular the ascendance in recent years of a particular discourse on interdisciplinarity where it is associated with a more generalised transformation in the relations between science, technology and society. We are therefore less concerned with interdisciplinarity in general than with the contemporary formation of interdisciplinarity: how it has come to be seen as a solution to a series of current problems, in particular the relations between science and society, the development of accountability, and the need to foster innovation in the knowledge economy. The present situation, we will suggest, can be understood as a problematisation: 2 the question of whether a given knowledge practice is too disciplinary, or interdisciplinary, or not disciplinary enough has become an issue and an object of enquiry for governments, funding agencies and researchers.
The HCI community has worked to expand and improve our consideration of the societal implications of our work and our corresponding responsibilities. Despite this increased engagement, HCI continues to lack an explicitly articulated politic, which we argue re-inscribes and amplifies systemic oppression. In this paper, we set out an explicit political vision of an HCI grounded in emancipatory autonomy-an anarchist HCI, aimed at dismantling all oppressive systems by mandating suspicion of and a reckoning with imbalanced distributions of power. We outline some of the principles and accountability mechanisms that constitute an anarchist HCI. We offer a potential framework for radically reorienting the field towards creating prefigurative counterpower-systems and spaces that exemplify the world we wish to see, as we go about building the revolution in increment.