Marcelo Wanderley: Revisiting Research on New Musical Interfaces

At NIME 2023 n Mexico City, Marcelo Wanderley from McGill presented a detailed paper diving into the histories and influences of computer music research on the NIME community of today. Marcelo began this research effort initially in conjunction with Joel Chadabe and presented it having completed it in Joel’s memory. — Rob Hamilton, PhD, Associate Professor of Music and Media, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Prehistoric NIME: Revisiting Research on New Musical Interfaces in the Computer Music Community before NIME (PDF, 6.4MB)

Part of this work stems from text written for a book project started several years ago in collaboration with J. Chadabe, one of the keynote speakers of NIME 2002, a project unfortunately aborted by his passing in 2021. Apart from being an exceptional person and a true pioneer, Joel’s contribution to interactive computer music (and, therefore, to NIME) cannot be overstated. — Marcelo M. Wanderley, PhD, Professor, Music Technology, Music Research Department, McGill University, Montreal, QC.

ABSTRACT

The history of the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference starts with the first workshop on NIME during the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in 2001. But research on musical interfaces has a rich ”prehistoric” phase with a substantial amount of relevant research material published before 2001. This paper highlights the variety and importance of musical interfacerelated research between the mid-1970s and 2000 published in two major computer music research venues: the International Computer Music Conference and the Computer Music Journal. It discusses some early examples of research on musical interfaces published in these venues, then reviews five other sources of related literature that pre-date the original NIME CHI workshop. It then presents a series of implications of this research and introduces a collaborative website that compiles many of these references in one place. This work is meant as a step into a more inclusive approach to interface design by facilitating the integration of as many relevant references as possible into future NIME research.

New Interfaces for Musical Expression, NIME.org, facilitates an annual series of international conferences held around the world, hosted by research groups dedicated to interface design, human-computer interaction, and computer music.