You’re An Instrument!: Creating active music-making experiences through worldbuilding and storytelling

Ciaran Frame, Erick Mitsak, and Alon Ilsar

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

This paper outlines the development and use of NIME supporting active audience participation within You’re an Instrument!, an immersive childrens’ theatre show that turns a planted audience member into a musical instrument. We outline the use of wireless gestural instruments in the show, exploring their novel use as hidden props and theatrical devices that help invite audience members into a fictional world. Through the creation of this fictional world, we illustrate how Digital Musical Instruments can be employed to build a narrative that may help to actively involve audience members. This paper is a call for instrument designers to consider using worldbuilding and storytelling techniques to more actively engage audience members in discovering the workings of new instruments.

Citation

Ciaran Frame, Erick Mitsak, and Alon Ilsar. 2025. You’re An Instrument!: Creating active music-making experiences through worldbuilding and storytelling. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15698815 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@article{nime2025_20,
 abstract = {This paper outlines the development and use of NIME supporting active audience participation within You’re an Instrument!, an immersive childrens’ theatre show that turns a planted audience member into a musical instrument. We outline the use of wireless gestural instruments in the show, exploring their novel use as hidden props and theatrical devices that help invite audience members into a fictional world. Through the creation of this fictional world, we illustrate how Digital Musical Instruments can be employed to build a narrative that may help to actively involve audience members. This paper is a call for instrument designers to consider using worldbuilding and storytelling techniques to more actively engage audience members in discovering the workings of new instruments.},
 address = {Canberra, Australia},
 articleno = {20},
 author = {Ciaran Frame and Erick Mitsak and Alon Ilsar},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.15698815},
 editor = {Doga Cavdir and Florent Berthaut},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 numpages = {8},
 pages = {142--149},
 title = {You’re An Instrument!: Creating active music-making experiences through worldbuilding and storytelling},
 track = {Paper},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2025/nime2025_20.pdf},
 year = {2025}
}