2015: Fourteen Years of NIME: The Value and Meaning of ‘Community’ in Interactive Music Research

Abstract

This paper examines the notion of community as commonly employed within NIME discourses. Our aim is to clarify and define the term through the community of practice framework. We argue that through its formal use and application, the notion of community becomes a significant space for the examination of emergent musical practices that could otherwise be overlooked. This paper defines community of practice, as originally developed in the social sciences by Lave and Wegener, and applies it within the NIME context through the examination of existing communities of practice such as the laptop performance community, laptop orchestras, as well as the Satellite CCRMA and Patchblocks communities.

Hands-Free Accessible Digital Musical Instruments: Conceptual Framework, Challenges, and Perspectives

“…Principles of participatory design have only recently started to enter the mainstream of DMI research [149]. Although some of the surveyed instruments mention the involvement of one or more subjects in the design cycle, developing participatory design approaches specific to HeaDMIs is yet another challenge for future research.…”

20 NIMEs: Twenty Years of New Interfaces for Musical Expression

“…The text files include the plain body text of the paper excluding front-matter, headers, footers, and list of references. Additionally, we created another numeric table which includes details of each conference manually extracted from the conference homepage 3 archive, such as the place, organizer, geolocation, keynote speakers and number of reviewers. The analysis component of the software processes the data within these tables to provide a variety of statistical information, including those presented in this paper, as well as mines the corpus for the most recurrent keywords or selected groups of keywords.…”

“…Recent publications reviewed the NIME corpus to analyze technical terminology [2], to examine the communities of practice [3], to investigate the meaning evaluation [4], to survey the longevity of novel instruments [5], to build an anthology of influential works representative of all topics in the corpus [6], to identify the practices and values of performers [7], to determine the gender balance [8], and to set an outward-looking political agenda for the community [9]. The increasing number of meta-studies or systematic reviews of the NIME literature highlights maturity of the community.…”

NIME and the Environment: Toward a More Sustainable NIME Practice

“…For instance, Marquez-Borbon and Stapleton reflected on the NIME community's values, addressing the positive effect of structuring knowledge in documented activities to help guide beginners' practice and learning process. They also reflected on how the lack of community understanding of performance inhibits constructive critique development [1]. Discussing the meaning of the community, Cantrell proposed five broad cultural categories for looking at histories, as well as creative and technical discourses surrounding the design of new musical instruments [2].…”

“…A shell script was written to automate the search and save results in a readable .csv format. 1 The script is placed in the root of a directory alongside sub-directories of NIME proceedings by year. It is run from the command line with any number of keywords to be searched for listed as arguments.…”