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@joe.wright set the channel purpose: Paper Session 12: Evaluation of NIMEs

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Matthew Rodger, Paul Stapleton, Maarten van Walstijn, Miguel Ortiz, Laurel S Pardue _What Makes a Good Musical Instrument? A Matter of Processes, Ecologies and Specificities_ paper id: *79* Lia Mice; Andrew McPherson _From miming to NIMEing: the development of idiomatic gestural language on large scale DMIs_ paper id: *111* Margarida Pessoa, Cláudio Parauta, Pedro Luís, Isabela Corintha, Gilberto Bernardes _Examining Temporal Trends and Design Goals of Digital Music Instruments for Education in NIME: A Proposed Taxonomy_ paper id: *115* Lauren Hayes, Adnan Marquez-Borbon _Nuanced and Interrelated Mediations and Exigencies (NIME): Addressing the Prevailing Political and Epistemological Crises_ paper id: *83* Tom Davis, Laura Reid _Taking Back Control: Taming the Feral Cello_ paper id: *81* Zoom link: https://us04web.zoom.us/j/72210829072?pwd=ZVlDd1ZZdmxtNFVNMFVhQ29ickhGZz09 Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz8WNY_I2S5TuB2n-bgPBRsoEqFSlPH6Q

Paper session 12: *Evaluation of nimes* will begin in three minutes!! (all the links above)

don?t forget: when asking a question in response to a paper, please indicate in your message to which paper presentation you are responding.  Either by mentioning the title of the paper or using the @ to direct it to the presenter. This will make it easier for people to follow the presentations and the Q&A later (due to being in different time zones). and please keep replies to the question in a thread!

About to start with @m.rodger, @p.stapleton , @m.vanwalstijn , @m.ortiz and @laurel.pardue, What makes a good musical instrument? A matter of processes, ecologies, and specificities!

Loving the metaphorically ecologically situated  presentation @m.rodger, @p.stapleton , @m.vanwalstijn , @m.ortiz and @laurel.pardue

@m.rodger, @p.stapleton , @m.vanwalstijn , @m.ortiz and @laurel.pardue, Do you think that the multiplicity of the NIME-er?s identity a part of this problem? Thinking of Sile O?modhrain?s ?varied stakeholders? here ? the musician is often the designer is often the composer and so on, and the definition of what is ?good? in any of those roles may be very different (or even in conflict).

@p.stapleton - yes. the maxim in ER (evo robotics) is "the world is it's own best model" - it's nice to think about that for human performers whose worlds are instruments, other humans, rooms, software agents etc

@m.rodger, @p.stapleton , @m.vanwalstijn , @m.ortiz and @laurel.pardue awesome work, I wonder if this could also feedback to HCI

This is Rod Brooks, after Dreyfus, Heidegger, MPonty etc

to elaborate - I think HCI could also learn a lot from this in-depth discussion

-

@m.rodger @p.stapleton @m.vanwalstijn Good stuff. I am very sympathetic to ecological turns in thinking about music, HCI and design (indeed have written a few things of my own about this). What I am wondering is whether, in the collision between these perspectives and NIME, that the influence can be two way. Can thinking about instruments, musicians and our makings lead us to reformulate or extend what we might mean by an ecology or an affordance? Can musicking drive the theory? Now that's what I call specificity!

Very interesting presentation, need to read your paper! @m.rodger, @p.stapleton , @m.vanwalstijn , @m.ortiz  @laurel.pardue You only briefly mentioned the role of the "environment". How does that fit into your thinking?

@m.rodger @p.stapleton maybe finding these hard to discover affordances is a reason to include neurodivergent people and musicians in the design process - rather than solely to "design for them" but to utilize their possibly different approach to refinement of the interface. Appreciate the conversation & looking forward to reading the paper.

Love @p.stapleton twin brother showing up in the background! :thinking_face:

@p.stapleton oh please Paul how can you do this to me at 4:15am... loved the presentation but your multiplicity of identities is jekyll and hyde echoing

NIME doppelganger

@l.mice and @a.mcpherson presenting now with: From miming to NIMEing: the development of idiomatic gestural language on large scale DMIs

It's the same top, so either @p.stapleton has to do a new one of these for every zoom call, or he always wears the same top...

@m.rodger @p.stapleton also interesting to look beyond 'skill' cf. shaun gallagher's work (enactivism, critique of dreyfus etc.)

@p.stapleton @m.rodger thanks so much you too for an excellent "constellation of affordances" wakeup!!

@p.stapleton I mean you two too

might be helpful: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07494467.2019.1684059?journalCode=gcmr20

Thanks all for the questions and comments! I will do my best to respond after this paper session is over.

@m.rodger @p.stapleton I have tons of questions and ideas, let's talk later!

We all have our specific personal views within this importance of the role of the environment. From my perspective is that musicking does not take place 'in the lab'. Social and community context on which any instrument is presented or introduced is as important as the choice of sensors/sound producing processes. Is the instrument joining an existing musical tradition? is it aiming for establishing something new? In general beyond the technical implementation, the role in which it will be (at least initially) presented is as important to us.

Yes!! I think that instruments, musicians and makings are super interesting from an ecological perspective and want eco psych people to pay attention to these for the benefit of concepts and to expand existing standard experimental research paradigms

Hi Quinn, this is very much in line with the paper. While we're talking in part about evaluation, it goes both ways in terms of intentionally design with your specific target processes, specficities and ecology in mind.

I think it already does in practice even if not discussed in this depth. We can look at the evolution of graphics tablets and e-pens which have been developed for a specific usage leveraging the affordances of writing on paper and expanding these with digital features. A contrast could be the Myo armband, which has become so popular at NIME but is now discontinued. The Myo arrived as an answer looking for questions. It launched with a lot of hype as you could 'control anything with arm gestures'. Turned out there were no general usages that were thought of (no environment and no specificities). It was great for those of us who managed to get one but now we are using a device that one day will die and is no longer supported.

I agree, the relationship between HCI and "Musical HCI" is definitely two-ways and that's why NIMErs should definitely land more CHI, DIS, TEI, etc. papers, which would benefit all these overlapping communities. It's not an easy task though, the contribution within and beyond musical interaction has to be extremely clear. I strongly recommend this paper on HCI and/vs Musical interaction: McDermott, James, et al. "Should music interaction be easy?." Music and human-computer interaction. Springer, London, 2013. 29-47.

@l.mice interesting study, so do you think a certain senserimotor sensations to tones of this new instrument influenced the gesture choice that became idiomatic?

@l.mice Great study! Nice reflection on the scaling down of many new commercial instruments. And I like the large scale of your setup. Makes me think about the fact that most standard/traditional instruments usually only come in one size (except for kids). Why isn't there more variability in instrument sizes? (this is more a reflection, not really a question for your study... :thinking_face:)

Same!

This is super interesting! I was wondering how this idea of push and pull effects and idiomaticity can apply to programming environments and how people choose to build systems (e.g., how people might assume things should be connected in a modular enviornment)

@l.mice can you tell us a bit about your sound design choices? What made you choose the timbre, sound, etc.

@l.mice Nice work! How did you come to making all of the 'bells' the same size? How does this relate to the tones they produce?

@l.mice @a.mcpherson Would there be a way, in your view, of accounting for the fact that (what seems) idiomatic for a instrument is also embedded in history (our experience of previous instruments) etc.? What if you show participants of each other playing?

@l.mice What made you choose the form + material of the instrument?

Thank you both for your answers. @m.ortiz definitely agree, loved the paper

@l.mice did making the tubes all the same size and all in a row affect the players ability to remember the mapped pitches? I imagine it's not as easy as, for example as a keyboard layout where the visual pattern of black and white keys helps to recognize the pitches before they are heard.

@margaridapessoa2, Cláudio Parauta, Pedro Luís, @isabelaalmeida29, @gba : Examining Temporal Trends and Design Goals of Digital Music Instruments for Education in NIME: A Proposed Taxonomy

@l.mice very interesting! Did you observe any restraint or hesitation in participants? movement size (dynamic range) due to the size of the instrument?

@l.mice @a.mcpherson: great talk and project, good to see research about how physical aspects of (larger) DMI's influence gesture and behavior. It confirms a lot that of intuitively experiences that I have as a player of physical instruments. Thanks for sharing this interesting project.

@l.mice weel done Lia! Interesting paper!

Hurrah!! I have sent you a DM of, essentially. comradely fellow feeling.

"Live" now: Margarida Pessoa, Cláudio Parauta, Pedro Luís, Isabela Corintha, Gilberto Bernardes _Examining Temporal Trends and Design Goals of Digital Music Instruments for Education in NIME: A Proposed Taxonomy_

@v.zappi totally, I think there is a very rich body of knowledge being produced which could really be relevant for the 'generic' HCI community

Your work is always a big influence for us!

:relaxed: wow that's a big compliment! Thanks!

Likewise!

By the way here's the paper from Tuuri et al. that we reference. "Who controls who? Embodied control within human-technology choreographies". We've found it relevant for a lot of DMI research. https://academic.oup.com/iwc/article-pdf/29/4/494/17710050/iww040.pdf?casa_token=tajLHhCNPfwAAAAA:O80cHRocfgBhyi-XSgXMD7WU9vo1hycbF5RrRTo55BW1VIqiLpUsMmNMSyFtevwe8inZkqK3kco

Thanks. Looks interesting.

@margaridapessoa2: score-driven, performance-driven, or hybrid - what about exploratory/ invention driven?

@l.mice @a.mcpherson, thanks for the talk and for this very interesting study, did you have any chance to visualise (in any format, diagrams, temporal-motion diagrams etc.) the idiomatic patterns that emerged in your study ? It might be in your paper as well, I will check later on.

The instrument was designed with a knowledge that the tuning would be reconfigured as part of the research. Therefore we chose a material that in itself would not create much of a tone when performed (for example if it was constructed with real metal it would acoustically ring when performed). Likewise we chose the material because it is lightweight - which makes transporting and constructing such a large instrument. (From our previous research interviewing performers of large traditional instruments we heard many stories of Joe the large instruments are so heavy to travel with that the performers choose to play them less than smaller versions.)

This was not a question that was asked in this study. Thank you for asking it as I think it would be useful to ask in the upcoming study in which the participants will be creating original compositions and performances.

@margaridapessoa2 @isabelaalmeida29 Very interesting work! I am surprised that there are not more focus on educational practices over time. Definitely something to encourage more of!

@margaridapessoa2 @isabelaalmeida29 @gba Was there any consideration in this taxonomy for the particular pedagogical approach or philosophy that drove the design of the DMIs in order to reach their goals?

@margaridapessoa2 @isabelaalmeida29 Think about instrument design for music education. What would be the biggest difference between traditional music instruments and DMI in this context? Could we use the same taxonomy and evaluation procedures in the education context for Traditional Music Instruments and DMI?

@margaridapessoa2 @enrique.tomas - it would be great to generate a reading across your respective papers - to see where the pedagogy of playfulness Enrique is developing might sit in this taxonomy (?)

@margaridapessoa2 @isabelaalmeida29 @gba How did you decide on the particular set of keywords that you adopted in the search process?

Every participant added new gestures to their repertoire of performance gestures with each task. The 3rd task was the one with the sound on, and in this task the participants developed performance gestures influenced by the sound of the instrument. Additionally in the 2nd task (having heard the sound of the instrument but still performing it silently), participants thought of and tried out new performance gestures - many of these were influenced by trying to imagine how certain tones were created.

@lauren.s.hayes and @adnan.marquez Nuanced and Interrelated Mediators and Exigencies (NIME): Addressing the Prevailing Political and Epistemological Crises

While NIME is an academic conference, the NIME community is not all based within academia. Hearing some of the comments already this week on Slack regarding terminology, language, and accessibility, I wanted to post some very brief copy n? paste terminology that might help with our paper. *_epistemology:_ *the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity _*exigency:*_ a state of affairs that makes urgent demands _*ontology:*_ a particular theory about the nature of being or the kinds of things that have existence

I agree, this would be super interesting :slightly_smiling_face: !

This looks extremely interesting. Over the last years I have been obsessed with how [good] instruments drive us, in line with Sid Fel's vision: Fels, Sidney. "Designing for intimacy: Creating new interfaces for musical expression." Proceedings of the IEEE 92.4 (2004): 672-685. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1278690&casa_token=rBDHOLIJp38AAAAA:fIuw8mooGAHFAileeNiNjht3LzZc93b4pTtHbj0_gy8H2_yd_dFFBssim-m8Xx2SP6lRyO0mng&tag=1 I was wondering if/how @m.rodger and @p.stapleton place this in their ecological perspective, i.e., the way we change our agency in accordance to how instruments respond to interaction. This is something that "generic tools" or even HCI artifacts rarely rely upon

"Live" now: Lauren Hayes, Adnan Marquez-Borbon _Nuanced and Interrelated Mediations and Exigencies (NIME): Addressing the Prevailing Political and Epistemological Crises_

Thanks for the interesting presentation @margaridapessoa2 et al. Some of the categories attributed to Magnusson (and cited in his work) were actually from Birnbaum et al (NIME 2005, NIME Reader 2017). Another interesting reference regarding taxonomies for DMIs: J. Piringer. Elektronische Musik und Interaktivität: Prinzipien, Konzepte, Anwendungen. PhD thesis, Institut für Gestaltungs- und Wirkungsforschung der Technischen Universität Wien, October 2001.

True! (Especially in the context of digital instruments) I would love a larger ?no menu diving? option of some of my favourite samplers/synths!

Magnusson`s work is cited in the paper

@</team/U016ZUM8ELF|Joseph Malloch> yes!

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez A timely and interesting paper.

Hi @isabelaalmeida29 just providing clarification, since the "required expertise" and "inter-actors" dimensions were not actually used in @t.magnusson's 2010 dimension space, but were included in his paper as an example of a previous taxonomy (Birnbaum et al. 2005).

Creative Practice Research is a formulation I haven?t come across yet ? anyone have a link to a good primer on this approach?

will post some resources after and others can chime in :slightly_smiling_face:

thanks!

In the UK Practice Reserach Advisory Group is a good starting point. https://prag-uk.org/resources/

Hi, @sallyjane.norman. Thanks for your question. According to Rowe and Drummond exploratory driven is related to performance.

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez nicely said the problematic areas on applying CHI evaluation methods on NIMEs, very interesting paper!

I'm looking forward to reading this paper!

The instrument was designed for the study, so the sound design was chosen to work within the context of what we needed for the study. We chose the timbre to feature a fundamental tone per pendulum, because this way it could be used for composition and performance of tonal music - and that would allow us to compare compositions (for example why certain notes or patterns are chosen). The Karplus-Strong code was adapted from the CHAIR Audio?s Tickle instrument ?bowed metal? code. This was an aesthetic choice because we like the sound. But we definitely chose to work with Karplus-Strong (rather than trigger a sample) so that there could be large variation in the tonal output. After interviewing performers of large traditional instruments it was very interesting to know that those instruments are very fragile and the tones can be changed with microgestures - so we chose to use Karplus-Strong with this in mind.

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez Great and important paper! Do you think is makes sense to think about _a_ field? Is that really so, or are we more of what Gurevich called a "community of communities"?

Thanks @jmalloch! This is an important contribution

Kapow!

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez Very inspiring stuff, thank you!

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez :clap: :clap: :clap:

@l.mice great compression on the voiceover on your talk !

Mic dropped

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez Wow! wow wow!

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez Wow!

is Creative Practice Research different to / more specific than Practice Research?

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez Thank you for such a thoughtful/thorough approach!

I think Joe is calling for a reasonable clarification. At least I'm a little confused, as it's my 2010 paper that is in dialogue with Birnbaum et al.'s paper, but in the References you list my 2017 paper on digital organics. I do think both my 2010 and 2017 papers are relevant for your good study, but perhaps clarification would be good? Thanks, I enjoyed your presentation. I hope you don't mind this detailed discussion.

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez Brilliant, and high time to bring this up as clearly and comprehensively!

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez Great stuff. If we are serious about access, diversity and open participation, we have to abandon consensus. The idea that there should be agreement about ontologies, epistemologies and aesthetics. Rather, perhaps, NIME should be a radically democratic terrain for dissensus.

Some similar points made in this paper on the theme of ?CHI4Good?: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3027063.3052766

The pendulums are all the same size because we knew that we would want to use multiple tunings (Version A and Version B) as a method for gathering data. In this way we could know that when a we notice a trend in patterns of pendulums performed in the same order, regardless of the tuning of the instrument, these patterns are influenced by the physicality of the instrument (rather than the tones they create).

Not agreement about ontologies, but recognising that ontology is an issue would be a good start

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez Your point about the lack of archiving is very timely! We really, really, really need help to solve this in a good way! Please reach out if you want to participate!

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez Thank you very much for this paper! While there are many issues involved here, how much do you think the dominant histories of music technology, which tend to explore the work of well-funded (white/male) Euro/American research centers as opposed to developments made in other practices, impact our view of ?New Interfaces for Musical Expression?? How important do you think revising this history will be for us to attempt to move forward?

Aha an OIME: Old Instrument for Musical Expression :joy:

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez brilliant and much needed paper! Plenty to discuss. @john.m.bowers just beat me to the 'dissensus' (Ranciere) point. Might this be a meaningful way to realise a way forward?

@lauren.s.hayes Despite the low number of publications on NIME2019 from Latin Americans, I believe the edition in Brazil helped to put NIME in the South America map. We increased the participation of Latin Americans and we hope we will increase the number of publications from them on the next years.

Blame me for the confusion ? I was looking at your dimension space figure in the 2017 paper, which includes the 2010 dimension space!

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez Great research! Thank you. I can't wait to read it. Your paper and the discussions we are having at this conference may make us a better and more diverse community. Lets keep talking at #nime-access-and-ecosystem

I also enjoyed the presentation ? I was just trying to add some older context.

And it brought home to those of us who had funding to travel there the challenges of in person participation for South American participants.

@a.r.jensenius @john.m.bowers @lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez in relation to ?community of communities?, maybe we could start discussing NIME?s ?culture of cultures? which i believe also shapes the common practices in NIME.

@lauren.s.hayes Thank you so much for bringing up citations. This is a latent yet virtually important point of discussion.

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez Really appreciate the aknowledgement that researchers coming from the arts/humanities have entirely different methods of going about their practices than those from the science/engineering

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez @p.stapleton Rancière? Never heard of him! Also: 'community' is an immensely problematic term too. It's not a given (or in a community of communities, several givens). It's something to make. Something that's to come.

yes. than kyou for being there!

@tdavis & Laura Reid Taking Back Control: Taming the Feral Cello

@marije +1 for citing artworks/performaces

@lauren.s.hayes great, great !

Thanks @lauren.s.hayes!

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez It is a matter of citation practices but also a matter of the methods of conducting research!

and Design as an emerging umbrella field in academia also uses completely different approaches to arts, humanities, sciences, and engineering!

Yes, read the paper!

1. @t.magnusson Hi Thor, is the organology: T. Magnusson. Musical organics: a heterarchical approach to digital organology. Journal of New Music Research, 46(3):286?303, 2017.

@lauren.s.hayes @adnan.marquez thanks for a fantastic paper, I really look forward to reading it!

I will: I look forward to it

thanks folks. will respond after this presentation.

great talk @lauren.s.hayes looking forward to reading the paper!

absolutely @rschramm. The conference was a great platform for this communication and exposure.

great points @lauren.s.hayes!!

Ok, now I understand.

They are independent (though obviously related) matters

Well done @tdavis :the_horns:

That 2017 paper has the 2010 dimension space which is talking with Birnbaum et al.'s paper. (no wonder we're confused :slightly_smiling_face:

Yes!

Last paper ongoing now!

@adnan.marquez @lauren.s.hayes great work! Congratulations! Let's keep working to foster these ideas!

Thanks for your answer - whats next for it?

In the English dialect of my birth, "OIME" is "I am".

(also, are these related to Research Through Design?)

@a.r.jensenius thanks. Yes, I hope this work will encourage people to work on projects with more focus on educational practices. :)

I'm quite digging the interview format that seems to have been etsablished in this session.

Are we allowed to keep doing it when (if) we go back to 'normal'?

(Sorry that should have said VITALLY important and now I can't edit it :upside_down_face:)

I think so in some way or another. I think it couples to the point about 'community' which I make below - which I may have stolen from Giorgio Agamben ("inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence").

@tdavis "always interesting to make something and give it to someone else" - great point - and good follow-on from @l.mice and @a.mcpherson piece earlier: the hand-over is what might elicit unforeseeable idiomatic gestures. The control question coming up now is great!

Presentation through conversation. We'll need primary coloured comfy chairs and Nordic glass ware. Agree tho, was also appreciating

@tdavis @Laura Reid nice conversation format for a paper presentation in NIME.

@tdavis (is Laura on here): that's a very powerful metaphor Laura deployed for the power dyanmic on stage

No - not on slack- but she is in the session.

@o.green Perhaps the conversation format could be the new "normal"?

Yes well future research might involve teaching certain performance gestures to all participants. For this study, we chose to show the participants no gestures at all. We just said you can perform the instruments with mallets if you like. And we chose participants with a range of musical training in different instruments so that their histories were broad.

@tdavis & Laura: "its got to be a fair fight", great stuff!

There is an upcoming study in London in which the participants will create original repertoire and perform a concert.

thanks @tdavis & Laura - stimulating reflections x

Great paper! @tdavis & Laura

It has a lot to reccomend it, when everyone has the proceedings already: perhaps going straight into more of a discursive panel format would get us to exploring some of the prodctive dissensus @john.m.bowers and @p.stapleton have advocated for

There was an interesting article in the NYT about how fairness is an essential part of the idea of play across species: (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/parenting/animal-behavior-play-games.html

We can extend those ideas to the people, machines, and instruments that we play music with.

great points @tdavis & Laura

great session

@tdavis & Laura, great point about role division! I've been having that same experience in learning to play my own instruments. Looking forward to reading your paper!

Thanks @sdbarton, looks great, but I don't have a NYT account. Could you upload a copy of the article here?

Hi, @corey2.ford. Thanks for your question. They are musical education related keywords. :)

But I work in Fine Art Department and they all hate me because I don't exhibit in white cubes. All I have to defend myself is my google scholar i-index!

@tdavis & Laura - thanks for a great contribution you two!

@marije nice point about undocument / tacit design decisions: I wonder how many we neglect to document because we don't even realise we've made them (the decisions)?

^bitter irony (or is it?) alert^

bravo, great session - thanks for chairing @marije

Well..... if work in the sociology of science and technology is anything to go on, we would find it impossible to replicate (remake) anything on the basis of published accounts alone!

Yes @john.m.bowers I think we said similar in the paper. The question, then, is how to make that work in practice...

a lot :slightly_smiling_face: I've been conducting some case studies for my book on mapping (https://justaquestionofmapping.info) and I'm trying to uncover some of these design decisions.

Enjoyed that a lot. Thanks everyone!

Looking forward to reading your book @marije!

tourability is one important design decision that I'm encountering in the discussion with professional musicians.

I think it would be more interesting in a lot of ways..

On the contrary, some participants said their instinct - because of the instrument?s size - was to smash it very hard. I had to remind some participants to not lean on the instrument! Also - not relating to gesture but relating to movement around the instrument - we received comments that the participant chose to stand in a certain place and that restricted them from reaching certain tones.

Tara Rodgers' work (which we cite) is very helpful here. The point is, it will take work and care. When you churn out papers, for example, do you just grab the first few citations that you find, or do you deeply look into the literature and try to amplify threads that have been largely ignored. Sara Ahmed's writing on citation practices is useful too. But of course it's not just about citation politics, but it does seem like a large issue in NIME.... What do YOU think?

@tdavis, ?Practicing and performing the instrument is the best way of evaluating the instrument? well said, definitely there is more growing intention at the moment to find different paths than this HCI / CHI culture in NIME.

Yes, it was something I realized I had difficulties with, with my thesis instrument; it has several round FSRs lined up equally in a row. It made me wonder if the problem was just my own general cognitive weakness in spatial layouts or if others would have the same problem.

You should ask @p.stapleton about his instrument design. IF I remember properly it's designed to fit in easy jet hand baggage.

Sorry to be super pedantic @o.green but can we really say that it's a decision if it's tacit?

Indeed! We talk a lot about 'new' and 'novelty' in the paper. What are we losing here?

Taking that to the extreme then, every movement of my body would be caused by a decision.

Also @o.green we probably don't mention things because we make assumptions about the competence of our readers. Or, because we had only one kind of MOSFET available to us, we didn't imagine the trouble faced by someone who had a choice (and the one we had is no longer manufactured). Etc. Etc. I found Donald Mackenzie's work on the proliferation of nuclear weapons some of the most powerful in this area.

@tdavis size, weight, replaceability, sturdiness...

repairability (and by whom)

Hi @lauren.s.hayes- it didn't get much coverage in either the video or the paper, but we're intentionally use the term 'skill' in a fairly liberal way, which is not wedded to traditional models of skill acquisition, but which is more closely aligned with something like the 'skilled intentionality' framework of Erik Rietveld and colleagues, which I think is reasonably commensurate with Gallagher's ideas. That is, skill is engaged coping with the world through soft-assembly of whatever resources (limbs, neurons, tools, other people) support such coping. At the same time, as part of the larger project we do intend to engage some of the methods and analytical tools of research on motor coordination and skill acquisition, to study changes in aspects of performance with time/practice etc. Describing the multiple ways that skill can be characterised and how these ways relate to each other is something I'm working on at the moment, but it wasn't well developed in this piece.

@marije Several of the robotic instruments that we have designed have been based on case dimensions, and whether one could fly with them or not (and what kinds of fees would be incurred - oversize / overweight - if so).

Yes, but it also has to WORK. Disciplinary hierarchies (as you know) lead to great imbalances. How can this be navigated within dissensus in a practical, equitable way?

(I can't stand my avatar here. I look like Trump... orange)

Thanks for this comment @dianneverdonk. I would love to chat more with you about your experiences with your large instruments sometime! :relaxed:

you can upload a picture @t.magnusson

@john.m.bowers Annotated portfolios perhaps as a way of documenting?

Thank you! :space_invader:

Thanks, and yes absolutely. It was very important. Our point was that it needs to be MORE SO.

Also, thanks for the paper link - @p.stapleton had shared this with me and I think it's got loads of great points that I need to think about, but unfortunately I hadn't got as far as reading it when drafting the NIME paper, so I didn't manage to incorporate these. Will try to do so in future papers

yes, can I perform the music I want to perform with this instrument is definately a key issue here. And then, can I tour with this instrument performing this music.

Amazing! Thanks @v.zappi!

Please. Do you want to elaborate?

https://prag-uk.org/glossary-of-terms/methodology/ this webpage on the site that @tdavis provided above outlines another common point of confusion for me (practice-based vs practice-led). I think that in the Research Through Design ecosystem, these two terms are somewhat analogous to _Design As Research_ and _Theory For Design / Research For Design_

Thanks. I'm in an interdisciplinary department (Arts, Media & Engineering) so it's my daily struggle :wink:

@tdavis well one of the appeals of that notion is that it recognises the tie between things and discourses (what we make and what we say about them) and how any particular set of annotations is at best partial.

thanks for listening x

@t.magnussonI think we can :smile: I'm can prepared to try an improvise an argument that tacit knowing is a sort of enculturation that can manifest as seemingly automatic and unreflective decision making!

Thanks Owen, now i need a beer x

Yes, please write response paper next year

perhaps a good reference here, for those not aware of these publications. The 3DMin project produced some interesting publications with contributions from different angles! https://www.3dmin.org/publications/

Don't start me...

@decampo can tell you all about that work!

In my thinking, I take the environment to potentially include the instrument, other musicians and their instruments, as well as the physical, social and cultural setting of the musical activity. Which aspects of these are important in a given context depend on the aspects of this (eco-)system that your interested in studying (hence the 'specificity' term). @m.ortiz makes some great points that show how the 'extended' (spatially, historically, culturally) environment is ever-present, and should be taken into consideration in design/evaluation as far as possible/relevant to one's research goals

While otherwise a fellow traveller on stuff, our mate Ingold has it in for 'tacit knowledge' @o.green @t.magnusson

Hi Koray. We have not tried this yet but I am experimenting with creating temporal-motion diagrams as I am sure it will be of use in the upcoming research as we monitor the evolution of patterns, especially in the context of developing repertoire.

IOW, I don't think I'd class tacit knowing as 'just' biological

I guess these kind of decisions are tacit, until someone asks, why did you make that decision?

Thanks everyone for a great session! @laurajaynereid, I agree. Time for a beer. I've set up a Jitsi meeting if people want to drink together and continue some of this conversation before the concert: https://meet.jit.si/NIMEBoozePataphysical_Arguments

have to look for some food first!

Wish I could. I've got to feed the kids!.

np. thanks i very much look forward to reading yours

@o.green I think you are right, but it seems like some decisions are on a discrete scale others on a continuous scale. Some linguistic other trained motor memory. On a continuum of sorts. If I improvise on my guitar, is every note a decision? Is the degree of pitch bend a decision? I guess we're into semantics here, and I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just "problematising" stuff as the humanists say.

Thanks! I?m glad someone noticed! :sparkles: I used a Avantone CV-12 tube condenser microphone.

@quinnjarvisholland - totally agree with you! The musician and instrument as a co-defining system entails that what is perceivable/actionable to one musician is not the same for other musicians with different outlooks, and histories and so on. Assuming as a designer that you could anticipate all aspects of these different specificities yourself is probably not a good approach, and so diversifying the sorts of musicians you engage with along the way should be prioritised

Yes, at the end of the day, what is mostly forgotten is that most of the NIMEs are for making music, musicking, and then putting that down to task analysis, usability studies I think becomes some sort of a problem.

Thanks for the paper recommendation @v.zappi ! I'm not familiar with this myself so will need to read it before I can answer your question, but I think that if one looks at the musician-instrument from the co-constituting ecosystem perspective that we are arguing for, then the behaviours of the instrument will certainly interact with the agency of the musician. Incidentally, there is some work in ecological psychology by Rob Withagen amd colleagues around agency and affordances which might be relevant to this idea:

In my own work I realized that there can always be improvements or upgrades to the instrument design. But at some point you need to stop and actually use the instrument, despite any design imperfections, and try to make lots of compositions because that was the point of starting the journey to make the instruments in the first place. Then by the time that you put in the time and effort into making compositions and scheduling performances the technology used to make the instrument is already becoming "old" and there is pressure to go back to either designing new instruments or improving current ones in order to stay relevant. It feels like a cycle that takes the emphasis away from composing/performing.

It's not yet drinking time here :pensive:

Yes, that would be great! Let's try and schedule a chat for tomorrow or else after the conference - I'm going to be tied up this evening from now

@adnan.marquez It's always happy hour somewhere :wink:

It is here:) but I have to give late dinner to kids as well, keeping the beer on the table !

@marije absolutely, though I think @t.magnusson is quite right to probe the extent to which we can really think of all these things as being actual choices (e.g. if you only have one MOSFET...); I suposse both Ingold and @john.m.bowers would urge us to widen the net still further and include what our material circumstances _invite_ (or maybe compell) us to do...

So, as always, we need more and better words...

encision = the tacit form of decision

Scales of attention / enculturation is helpful here [cf a future thing with Juan]

Hi @aweisling - I think this is a great point, and one that we wanted to try and problematise in the paper (as Sile also did in her paper). The idea of an instrument being 'good' or not is nonsensical given all the variable factors at play, hence the need to consider the specific motivations for asking that question in a given context, and to unpack from there

@john.m.bowers a defense that does not guarantee a good night?s sleep! At my school, which is a Polytechnic, I often see those in the humanities and arts (which is my home department) identifying their practice as ?research? not to illuminate methodological similarities between distinct fields, but in an attempt to convince colleagues and administrators in other disciplines of its rigor and value. Part of the problem is not only that artistic practice is traditionally not documented in the same way that scientific research is but also that the methods and artifacts of that documentation would be different in kind.

tim tim NIMER´S :clinking_glasses:

Just curious, does this work for you? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/parenting/animal-behavior-play-games.html?smid=em-share

Thanks for doing it! A delight to see two excellent people talking: I could almost imagine we were all in a pub together...

Also time away from practicing and virtuosity on an instrument because that traditionally takes hours of practice.

@john.m.bowers yeah, I'm the weirdo at a traditional music and arts department :man-shrugging:

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Obviously I think yes :grin: but lately I?ve been wondering about the history of music technology more broadly and how many important innovations that have the greatest impact on the music we listen to today are basically ignored in both the academic literature as well as in standard curricula. For example, Grandmaster Flash/turntablism or Dub and the mixing console/effects/etc.. Also we aren?t talking about more current practices, e.g. chopped and screwed. It?s prescient that you (presumably) wrote your paper before the recent BLM protests and calls for dramatically reimagining/decolonizing the standard music curriculum. I guess I?m thinking about my role as a tenured professor and trying to understand how I can try to use this position for positive change, and how to make positive change a mission of my scholarly work, but in a way that tries to make the world a better place, not one that advances my career. Ultimately I?m hoping one positive element of COVID is that it upends all traditional structures and allows us to build a more accessible and inclusive world. Anyway, no worries about responding to me further in this medium :slightly_smiling_face: (I appreciate that you?ve responded to everyone!), but keep fighting the good fight and hopefully our paths cross again soon!

this works thanks Scott, and realising I'd read it - probably because we Kiwis get lots of stuff about keas, which are fantastic birds. They dismantle the roof you're sleeping under, preferably at the top of very cold mountains...

@steventkemper fortunately it seems there is already a revisionist process, as we mentioned in the Lerner paper from last year's NIME, but more work needs to be done to present and highlight those works from underrepresented regions.

Right, I am concurrently attending https://www.ed.ac.uk/edinburgh-college-art/reid-school-music/decolonising-musical-university. In the paper, when we say 'issues of race have been largely ignored' it's specifically that. Black Noise by Tricia Rose is a great resource. Why have the innovations from Dub and Hip Hop, for example, been so absent in NIME work? The lens of Whiteness (and its dominance) is useful here...

@adnan.marquez @lauren.s.hayes thanks for sharing!

will do! I'm writing a book at the moment (https://justaquestionofmapping.info) and a lot of this resonates. I'm still outlining my chapter on aesthetics, trying to situate these questions of mapping in different fields (music, dance, interactive art, media art), which in the end also has to do with the ecologies within which people are working. My idea is that a lot of decisions people make along the way, can be made more conscious if you are explicit about the aesthetics you are trying to achieve and they are of course influenced by the context within which you create a work.

quite a few artists are looking for surprise, or systems that work against them, so they have to put in effort. I think music in particular has an aim to be not goal oriented, but rather process oriented, musicking

They sound like they enjoy a bit of mischief!

@p.stapleton and others. Jitsi link still working. I just went back in.

@ Lia Mice yeah that would be great! Maybe I can combine sometime visiting the lab maybe... always inspiring to drop by!

ah sorry to miss the hang gang x

I don't know the context of Lauren's article but in PRAG terms, practice reserach could be in any field, such as healthcare. Creative Practice Research seems to suggest practice research specifically through creative practice.

Same here. Looking forward to drinks in person sometime.

Hey @marije - thanks for sharing the link to your book project! I'd love to hear more details about your work. I think that there are some interesting connections between issues of aesthetics in mapping and more 'low-level' processes of action-perception loops, i.e. how actions as mapping inputs connect with auditory/visual/haptic events as mapping outputs. Would be great to discuss with you

Yes!

The cog. sci. journal 'Beavioural and Brain Sciences' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_and_Brain_Sciences) has had something like this for decades - articles are published commentary by the referees, along with extensive commentary (and response from authors) from others. Unfortunately the journal itself seems to be behind a paywall. I used to look at it in printed format. The accompanying commentary was always super interesting for getting a general sense of topic, sometimes more than the original article itself.

Known as 'Open Peer Commentary'. Open in the sense that the referees and commentators identities are known - BBS does not seem to be open access.

Looks like BBS is 'hybrid' so that some article are open access. To peruse articles and commentaries: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/most-read

Unfortunately the classic 2010 article 'The Weirdest People in the World?' does not have peer commentary. (WEIRD = Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic)

I guess this is somehow similar to what Empirical Musicology Review is doing? They have two public commentaries per paper: https://emusicology.org/

@john.m.bowers @adnan.marquez @p.stapleton cf. 'Creative disagreement' Stevan Harnad (1979) and 'open peer commentary' https://archipel.uqam.ca/99/1/creative.disagreement.html

@a.r.jensenius The 'community of communities' concept goes back at least to Brown & Duguid's article on Organizational Learning in the early 90s and has been discussed in contrast with 'communities of practice' by @adnan.marquez and @p.stapleton in their '14 years of NIME' article, and previously in the large literature on situated learning which was especially active in the 90s and 00s.

Constructivist Foundations does something similar, with a group of responses and then a response-to-the-responses for each article. At the other end of things, Contemporary Music Review has from time to time done discussions-as-papers (and then there's Ranolph Glanville interviewing his future self (or was it past self?) in LMJ!)

Thanks @s.holland! This was more emergent than planned. When we finished recording and listened back to the audio, my first thought was "we are trapped in our own metaphor." I hope the captions helped compensate for the participation of lawnmowers and magpies. :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks Alice, I've been meaning to check out more Brooks (I think you also pointed me in his direction back in 2017), although I hope he is more influenced by MPonty than Dreyfus and Heidegger. Tangent: "the world is it's own best model" brought to mind Umberto Eco's short essay _On The Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1_.

Thanks @juan.jpma for the comment and thanks @v.zappi for the paper suggestion. I will check that out. As much as I'm critical of the adoption of certain approaches from HCI in the context of musical instrument design and performance, I've also been influenced by much of the HCI literature (e.g. Lucy Suchman, Bill Gaver) and I think some of the current trends in CHI are exciting (e.g. Keyes' et al. _Human Computer Insurrection: Notes on an Anarchist HCI_ from CHI 2019). I agree that more dialogue between CHI and NIME would be a good thing.

@quinnjarvisholland great comment. As Laurel and Matthew have said above, this is very much in line with our thinking.

I have no idea what you are talking about :)

@a.r.jensenius thanks for the question. The environment, in multiple senses of the word, is definitely a core concern for us. In the paper we reference Baggs and Chemero's _The third sense of environment_, which elaborates on Gibson?s conception of the environment, subdivided it into the 'habitats' of species, and the 'Umwelts' of individuals. This move helps "resolve a tension between ecological psychology and the separate-but-related approach to agents and their activities in their environments of enactivism." The relevance for NIME is that this allows us to move away from the idea of musical 'users' towards musical 'ecologies'. From our paper: "This is perhaps the most straightforward sense of _ecology_: a system comprising an agent and environment. In this case, between a particular musician and their individual capacities to engage and interact with a given instrument (i.e. the constellation of affordances it instantiates)"... as well as... "A broader sense of ecology comes from recognising that no agent is an island, but rather a member of a community of agents and that community shapes the capacities and dispositions of the agent (as well as that of the instrument)."

Oh yes! At one point we had a copy of that paper on the lab's main coffee table! I gotta re-read it at some point

Great, thanks, looking forwards to reading the paper!

Yes, looking forward to future conversations. Also, I really like this idea from the description of your book: "Examples of implementations of these methods will be provided separate from the book in a repository to which readers of the book can contribute."

@p.stapleton, oh that paper is SO VERY CRITICAL TOO and I love it (; I agree with you and that's why I am a strong supporter of the idea that NIME/Music approaches would be highly beneficial to the HCI community. That's what I meant with "Musical HCI" [maybe off-putting term], basically something that replaces the "dogmas" of HCI with alternative approaches that are more in line with the critical theory and the creative practice we are developing here as a _community of communities_ [I really love this term!]. Your work is one of the driving forces for the development of such a research approach IMO.

To be more practical, I am working with @boem.alberto, @leprotto.giacomo and Giovanni Troiano on a new user study on non-rigid "generic" interfaces that targets "pure" HCI findings and publications, but that gravitates around the thematic analysis and the reflections stemmed from the study on non-rigid musical interfaces we have just presented, and in particular from the creative practice and the musical attitude of the surveyed experts. We hope this will bring some fresh air and a novel and valuable perspective in the field of non-rigid interfaces. There are several powerful examples of this loopback from NIME to CHI, for example the work from Troiano I linked in #papers14-hci-new-interfaces-instruments or the works from @a.mcpherson, but we'd like to see more of these!

Cool! I am fascinated by imaginary gestures :slightly_smiling_face: or gestures of how one imagines sound would be created, I don't know if you came across this Deniz Peters paper Touch, Real, Apparent and Absent, but it has provoked some of my research on this topic.

Thanks @v.zappi. I'm pleased that NIME has become more accommodating of critical theory and artistic practice in recent years, although I think there is still much work to do to create a more equitable relationship between the different approaches to research found within our community of communities. I recognise that this is not an easy process, and that it is also crucial for NIME to address wider issues of access, participation and diversity (inspiring paper this year by @lauren.s.hayes and @adnan.marquez on related issues). Re "Musical HCI", this isn't the formulation I would personally use (music making has always been entangled with technologies, and I'm not interested in privileging the digital over the electronic, acoustic, mechanical... I've also stopped using DMI and DMIs) but I still appreciate what you are getting at here. During a meeting while we were developing our _A NIME of the Times_ paper, @abi made an important point which found its way into our paper. This is perhaps worth restating here as I think it speaks to the type of potential you are also pointing to: "Only relatively recently has the HCI community begun to engage with interaction that has no task, and there is limited room within HCI scholarship for such artistically-motivated research that occurs largely through practice. As Bin states, ?the concerns of DMI research are not confined to a curious corner of HCI scholarship where people make weird music?, and that this long tradition of exploring what it means to create artistic works with computers means that ?this community may have a monumental head start in insight and knowledge in this realm?. This means that we not only have the opportunity to deepen and enrich our own discourse, but because this community is one with decades of experience in what is emerging in other fields as a new phenomenon, we may have useful insight to offer to others."

Thanks for sharing @michael.lyons!

@v.zappi I'm looking forward to reading more about your collaborative research into non-rigid interfacing. Nice that you mentioned @juan.jpma work in the discussion earlier. Thanks also for the link to the Troiano paper. And of course, Andrew and co's work is a great example of NIME feeding back to CHI.

This point that @p.stapleton summarised above is from the conclusion of my thesis, and something that I feel very strongly after vacillating between HCI and NIME as a scholar. I think that HCI is really struggling to come to grips with taskless interaction, where NIME has been doing this kind of improvisational, exploratory stuff for decades. We know so much about this liminal, creative, fuzzy space, and I think we have a lot to offer other disciplines - even though NIME papers submitted to CHI usually come back with a big red X on them and the review is "Just send it to NIME" :joy:

@abi, where can I get a copy of your thesis?

Listening to @p.stapleton say ?musicians are not users? in NIME 2018 was definitely remarkable in shaping the way I see my research with musicians

Here's Astrid's thesis ("The Show Must Go Wrong: Towards an understanding of audience perception of error in digital musical instrument performance"): https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/39185/Bin%2C%20S.%20M.%20Astrid.%202018_final.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Thanks Andrew!

Hi @sdbarton, strange, the second link you sent worked yesterday, and I bookmarked it to read later, but when I just opened it now I'm prompted to log in. Was it shared on a time limited basis? If possible, please fire it to me over email (). Thanks!

Hi Rodrigo @rschramm, sorry for the late answer, 1) nice to hear from you! 2) better late than never! :blush:. Well, this could be a long discussion. The challenge of this work was to bring to the discussion the use of a taxonomy on a specific the pedagogical approach for DMIs, towards new corporeality, materiality, control and feedback,

Hi @adnan.marquez, sorry for the late answer here on slack; as we had this discussion on line maybe I already answered your question. The first phase of our work, was to identify and select the papers including one or more keywords relevant to the practice of education. For the second phase, we did a review of their contribution, then, we did the taxonomy research for DMIs in education. Promote new pedagogical approaches for DMIs was our aim.