Historically marginalised instruments witness and bear vital stories that can deeply affect identity and galvanise communities when revitalised. We present the protolangspil as a contemporary interpretation of the langspil, an Icelandic monochord-like folk instrument, and describe its agential and performative contributions to the first Icelandic NIME research lab. This paper describes how the proto-langspil has served as an instrument in establishing the research methodology of our new lab and concretised the research agenda via a series of encounters with music performers and composers, luthiers, anthropologists, musicologists, designers and philosophers. These encounters have informed and challenged our research practices, mapped our surroundings, and embedded us in the local social fabric. We share our proto-langspil for replication, and reflect on encounters as a methodology framing mechanism that eschews the more traditional empirical approaches in HCI. We conclude with a final provocation for NIME researchers to embrace AI research with an open mind.

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