The Memory Cloud: Personal media libraries as affordance and constraint

Yann Seznec

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

The Memory Cloud is a musical instrument that uses a player’s own library of personal recordings as sonic material. This paper presents the design of the instrument, situating it within sustainability HCI studies and constraints-based design, before describing the instrument being used by two musicians in a professional context. Over 2000 sounds from the musician's personal cloud library, dating back over 10 years, were placed in the instrument as the only sonic material available for exploring. I argue that a radically small scale and personal approach could be one strategy for addressing the issues of longevity in NIME, and I suggest that using personal media libraries presents a potential affordance and constraint for musical instrument design.

Citation

Yann Seznec. 2025. The Memory Cloud: Personal media libraries as affordance and constraint. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15698924 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@article{nime2025_65,
 abstract = {The Memory Cloud is a musical instrument that uses a player’s own library of personal recordings as sonic material. This paper presents the design of the instrument, situating it within sustainability HCI studies and constraints-based design, before describing the instrument being used by two musicians in a professional context. Over 2000 sounds from the musician's personal cloud library, dating back over 10 years, were placed in the instrument as the only sonic material available for exploring. I argue that a radically small scale and personal approach could be one strategy for addressing the issues of longevity in NIME, and I suggest that using personal media libraries presents a potential affordance and constraint for musical instrument design.},
 address = {Canberra, Australia},
 articleno = {65},
 author = {Yann Seznec},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.15698924},
 editor = {Doga Cavdir and Florent Berthaut},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 numpages = {6},
 pages = {446--451},
 title = {The Memory Cloud: Personal media libraries as affordance and constraint},
 track = {Paper},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2025/nime2025_65.pdf},
 year = {2025}
}