The Community studio as Score: Composing experimental music infrastructures

Yashas Shetty

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

This paper presents the Indian Sonic Research Organisation (TheISRO) as a 20-year durational artwork treating organizational infrastructure as compositional practice. Founded in Bangalore in 2006, TheISRO explores what becomes possible when decisions about space, tools, access, and governance are approached as aesthetic choices rather than administrative necessities. The work operates through specific methods: open source logic as organizational principle (fork, modify, share, iterate), constraints engaged as compositional material rather than obstacles, ecological temporality prioritizing slow responsive growth over institutional scaling, and community treated as medium with agency rather than passive audience. This practice has generated a 32-channel spatial audio lab, extensive workshop programs, and spawned related initiatives iaround ambisonic Microphones, experimental music interfaces, the ISSAI record label, and the Lekha.cc archival platform. Two decades of sustained practice reveals insights about knowledge production, sustainability, and situatedness that move beyond conventional research approaches. This paper examines how treating infrastructure development as artwork generates understandings of experimental music communities that academic publication cycles cannot capture, offers provocations about what counts as research contribution, whose practices count as research, and how alternative practices might inform knowledge production.

Citation

Yashas Shetty. 2026. The Community studio as Score: Composing experimental music infrastructures. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20784419 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_137,
 abstract = {This paper presents the Indian Sonic Research Organisation (TheISRO) as a 20-year durational artwork treating organizational infrastructure as compositional practice. Founded in Bangalore in 2006, TheISRO explores what becomes possible when decisions about space, tools, access, and governance are approached as aesthetic choices rather than administrative necessities. The work operates through specific methods: open source logic as organizational principle (fork, modify, share, iterate), constraints engaged as compositional material rather than obstacles, ecological temporality prioritizing slow responsive growth over institutional scaling, and community treated as medium with agency rather than passive audience. This practice has generated a 32-channel spatial audio lab, extensive workshop programs, and spawned related initiatives iaround ambisonic Microphones, experimental music interfaces, the ISSAI record label, and the Lekha.cc archival platform. Two decades of sustained practice reveals insights about knowledge production, sustainability, and situatedness that move beyond conventional research approaches. This paper examines how treating infrastructure development as artwork generates understandings of experimental music communities that academic publication cycles cannot capture, offers provocations about what counts as research contribution, whose practices count as research, and how alternative practices might inform knowledge production.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {137},
 author = {Yashas Shetty},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20784419},
 editor = {Benedict Gaster and João Tragtenberg and Anna Xambó and Tom Mitchell},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {},
 numpages = {6},
 pages = {1122--1127},
 title = {The Community studio as Score: Composing experimental music infrastructures},
 track = {paper},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_137.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}