Musical interfaces marathon – NIME ’24 day 1

This week I’m at the NIME conference in Utrech – New Interfaces for Musical Expression. I’ve had a busy few months with gigging, conference presentations and co-writing a paper, so not had the energy or inclination to keep up to date with blogging. But after a couple of conversations yesterday about the benefits of regular informal writing and and posting, I’m back again with a few notes from the conference. These are accumlated thoughts, points of reference and idea-seeds rather than particualry well formulated notes. Presented here roughly in chronological order.
(as of date of wrting the papers aren’t publically available, I’ll add links later to access them)

Excellent to see Christian Faubel perform live with his piece titled “songs from my analogue utopia”. The setup is a series of tiny actuators flicking stretched elastic bands, which are amplified with contact mics. The whole array is set up on an overhead projector giving a zero-latency real-time projection of each individual percussive strike. The osciallating motors are triggered by analogue clock signals from a modular synth. I’ve come across some of Christian’s writing about entrainment of oscillators previously – so there may have been some of that going on. Clocks were running in and out of phase, generating interesting polyrhthyms with the delicate but rich pings. Great to see the processes up close, as we were invited as an audience to gather round for the set.

Also glad to watch Dylan Beattie perform live, my first experience in a concert setting having visited his studio previously.

Impressed Dylan brought 60kg of vinyl lathe equipment across on the train! His set featured real-time cutting of grooves into vinyl dubs, using a handheld homemade stylus/tattoo gun. Some great textures and serendipitous moments. I liked the liveness of the set, with certain abrupt drop-outs and dynamic changes which belied the intricate and fragile nature of the process.

Zeynep Özcan & Anıl Çamcı gave a really interesting paper on use of juggling with physical-digital interfaces. Neither of these are particularly areas of interest for me but the parallels between the rhythms and cycles of juggling and those of musical rhythms and loops were intriguing. The research involved voicing three juggling balls in different ways, with sensors responding to accelration, jerk and impact, and each of the balls given a specific different sounding voice. Of most interest was the discussion of failure – neither of the paper’s authors were experienced jugglers and, as such, their attempts at testing the interfaces involved many drops, fubmles, clashing and impacts which skilled jugglers would not incur. As their reserach progressed their juggling skills also improved – but they found the musical ouput of the devices became less interesting. They began to deliberately fail sometimes, dropping balls on purpose, acting out errors, reverting to less-skilled behaviour in order to reintegrate the more interesting musical gestures. “Feigning mistakes to retain some of the sonic affordances of failure,” to quote the paper. This isn’t something i’ve come across before, something to think about further.

You can now watch the paper presentation/video here:

I also gave my own paper on Wednesday morning, titled Ironing In The Creases: Developing An Idiosyncratic Electro-mechanical Musical Instrument By Reinforcing Its Faults. My intention was to talk about my making process and how it works in a cycle, including the key decision points where I acknowledge the aspects of a new development which are causing problems or issues, which can also potentially be benefits or produce interesting musical effects. My paper ended up being quite long, as I wanted to include lots of contextual information about thinking relating to the process, and also needed to establish some of the precedents and context for the project itself. Neeless to say it was tricky then to get it all into the 10 minutes allocated for the presentation. There’s a video version here which is essentially the same as what I presented:

I had some good feedback from other attendees including some questions that got me thinking. Responding to one question in the room I mentioned that I had some personal rules or an unwritten manifesto which had been guiding the project. I’ve never formally written this out, but have started to make notes towards doing so for myself.

Specifically these are things like:

No direct playing. All sounds are played by the machine: I wouldn’t, for example, set up a beat and then do a synth solo over the top.
No backing track. This has been a rule of mine for so long it’s second nature. Performing along to a linear recording restricts the option for pacing, live arranging the material, which is fundamental to any performance for me.

I’m not going to write them all out here, just a couple of points by way of illustration.

At the first evening concert, John Bowers played a few short sets using some strategies developed with Robin Foster around rummaging with various digital and algorithmic augmentations. The weird little garage unit at the venue gave it a classic noise gig vibe which worked realy well. Part of John’s approach is running several different mappings from the sensor inputs concurrently, then mixing between the outputs. This creates a system which is both responsive and playable, with seemingly infinite variation available.

An intense finish to the day came from Transsonic (Viola Yip/Nicola Hein) who played an absolutely searing noise set with handheld lasers and an integrated system of sound controller and distorted guitar. A dark room with only red lasers to provide light, I couln’t see quite what was happening – but the responsivity was apparent and the soundscape flitting around the powerful club system worked amazingly well.
Here’s a video version of their performance, submitted prior to the conference as far as I’m aware – play it loud!

The days are long and intense at NIME. The first day’s programme started at 9am and finished at 11pm. I think I counted about 16 papers and 12 performances I’d seen during the day, plus all the poster presentations and demos. So, necessarily this is just a sample of the highlights. I’ll likely post more later in the week, depending if I run out of energy beforehand. Luckily most of the venues here sell Club Mate.