History of NIME: Works, Performances and Community

Hello NIMEers, I thought it would have been a good use of the forum to ask this question.

I am in the process of creating a few slides for a class that I’m teaching on the History of NIME. I am obviously aware of the 2017 NIME Reader, and I’m using it as a basis to give my students an overview of what has been presented and how the community has grown throughout the years. I am also aware specifically of “2015: Fourteen Years of NIME: The Value and Meaning of `Community’ in Interactive Music Research” which will help me explain the NIME community even further.

Other than these two resources, does anyone know if there is any paper, blog-post, or resource I could use to get an even wider overview of the NIME’s history?

Apologies in advance if I have missed any obvious bits, I decided to post here before diving into the research (trying to account for the time it will take some of you to read and reply!)

Thanks in advance!

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Hi Niccolo, when I was writing my PhD I was shocked at the lack of historical documentation of NIME instruments and practice. In my thesis I wrote a wide survey of NIME instruments that I’m now I’m working into a larger forthcoming work on NIME taxonomy, but if the early stages are useful it can be found here in Chapter 2.

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@astrid this is so awesome! Thank you very much!

I was amazed too by the lack of historical documentation. Also I seem to remember a paper on this, but I must have dreamt it!

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Hi Niccolo, I have found that “New Digital Musical Instruments: Control And Interaction Beyond the Keyboard” (2006) has a wealth of information that has guided me in the past. It’s not necessarily a history of NIME, but it captures the field quite nicely at that time.

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Hi Niccolo,

nice initiative. Are your slides about the history of the NIME conference (and 2001 CHI workshop) or about the field of NIME? If it’s about the field, then it actually there is a lot of pre-NIME material out there, at least material related to interface design. Research and performance with new interfaces started way before the CHI workshop, though the acronym “NIME” did not exist until then (see my comments on Perry Cook’s paper in the NIME Reader on the origins of the field: the NIME 2001 workshop acted as a marvelous catalyzer to create an international research community that united pre-existent ICMC and HCI communities). Lots of work ion interfaces pre-2001 appeared mostly at the ICMC (International Computer Music Conference - all ICMC proceedings are now online!), most notably since the mid-80s. Similarly, several special editions of the CMJ (Computer Music Journal) focused on “New Performance Interfaces” (14:1, 14:2, 22:1…). Books such as The Computer Music Tutorial and Electric Sound had either full chapters or substantial material on interfaces. The e-book Trends in Gestural Control fo Music was entirely devoted to new interfaces (and was cited as a reference in the proposal for the CHI 2001 workshop). The book Digital Musical Instruments focuses on NIME-related works since the 70s (mostly form ICMC), covering the NIME conference until around 2004. Lots of other stuff was available on the web, for instance, the EMF/ICMA Interactive Systems and Instrument Design Workgroup (created in 2000 and now available at https://sensorwiki.org/isidm, with outdated but still useful introductory texts and extensive lists of references on interface design, mapping, dance technology, etc.) Probably there is way more than the above, it would be worth compiling a more extensive list of references. Cheers!

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Sorry, I forgot to add that the ebook “Trends in Gestural Control of Music” is downloadable from https://www-archive.idmil.org/publications/books/trends_in_gestural_control_of_music

http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~mwanderley/Trends/Trends_in_Gestural_Control_of_Music/

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Re: Marcelo’s excellent list of resources, “Trends in Gestural Control of Music,” was certainly an important influence on the CHI’01 NIME proposal document. In particular, my decision to use the word ‘expression’ in the workshop title was partly influenced by a close reading of the discussions with performers on TIGCM (at that time a CD-ROM), including people like Atau Tanaka, Michel Waiswicz, Laetitia Sonami etc… Those discussions resonated very strongly with my thoughts and reasons for suggesting to my colleague Ivan Poupyrev, a few weeks earlier after he returned from SIGGRAPH 2000 in late July 2000, that we organize a CHI’01 workshop on musical interfaces. I was lucky to have a copy via my ATR colleague Tomoko Yonezawa, who brought the very recently released TIGCM CD-ROM back from that year’s ICMC held Aug 27 - Sept 1, 2000 in Berlin. I recall that the CD would not play properly on my computer, but that I was somehow able to access some partial texts - it felt a little like doing archaeology but I was very highly motivated to access what was written on the disk. What I was able to access definitely had an influence. The NIME proposal was submitted to CHI not long after that - the deadline was Sept 8 that year - so we only had a couple of days to look at the TIGCM CD-ROM. The rest, as they say, is history.

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Re: history, I would add that even more important than textual sources were the people who influenced us more or less directly towards organizing the first workshop. So for example, Axel Mulder spent more than a year visiting ATR in the late 90s. Sid Fels was a researcher at ATR for about two years in the same area. Kazushi Nishimoto and Tomoko Yonezawa had also worked on musical interface projects at ATR. Ivan had just demo’d his ‘Augmented Groove’ project at SIGGRAPH 2000. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau ran an inspiring program of media arts research at ATR in the late 90s. We were also very fortunate to connect with Tina Blaine (Bean) while we were writing the proposal, and also that Sid Fels visited ATR for a few days at that time so that we could get him involved. What is totally undocumented is the important influence of an informal and eclectic group of experimental musical instrument designers that used to gather at the junction of the Kamo and Takano rivers on the first weekend of October every year.

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Hi everyone, thanks for your replies. Looks like the taxonomical subdivision provided by @astrid was exactly what I was looking for.

The class I’m preparing will be divided into 3 parts. The first two serve more of a historical background and window on the 1900s. So for the final NIME oriented part, a quick taxonomical overview of what has been done in the past 20 years (both published at NIME and not) is exactly what I was looking for.

Thank you all for the valuable information provided in this thread. I seem to understand that there is a lot of undocumented material waiting to be consolidated… we need a NIME publication around the topic!

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For several years, Sid Fels and I offered an introductory NIME-related course at SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia, as an outreach activity. This was similar to the NIME Primer course we used to offer as a NIME pre-conference tutorial. There are various versions of a PDF with the slides available at the ACM digital library, and you can find one version, from SA 2017 here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321325610_How_to_design_build_and_perform_with_new_musical_interfaces

The course contains a lot of videos, which are not viewable from the PDF, unfortunately. I’ll have to prepare a multimedia version sometime.

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@mjl this is an amazing repository! Even though I already completed my “history” lecture, I might make another one inspired by the slides you just shared!

Thank you!

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That would be great!

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Perhaps after we have found a multi-media platform for NIME.

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Andi Otto has written and presented a lot about the history of the projects done at STEIM. His thesis is still in need of a translator to English: http://www.andiotto.com/teaching-and-research

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