Anywhere and here: zcreative a toolkit for distributed control

Benedict Gaster, and Nathan Renney

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

This paper is about sound and by extension the design of musical instruments through the window of shared play, memory, place, and materiality. It looks at NIME design within the context of folktales and storytelling. Exploring the design of a distributedmusical controller and its entangled use for performance andtabletop role-playing games that incorporate sound. What doesit mean for a musical performance to be a community or a gameto create a story on the one hand and be an instrument on theother?We play with this question through the design of a new musicalinstrument toolkit, zcreative, which is a set of autonomouslyentangled controls, forming a network of concurrent controllers,that manipulate a whole.zcreative is explored through three examples, considering whata NIME might be in an ever entangled web of interactions. FMfor 8 phones is a multi-channel spatial sound peformance, wherethe listeners are also performers; radical interaction opens up aNIME themed podcast through community listening; and pebblesis a sound driven tabletop role-playing game, where sound is firstclass and forms an additional creative axis for story telling.

Citation

Benedict Gaster, and Nathan Renney. 2026. Anywhere and here: zcreative a toolkit for distributed control. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20784038 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_3,
 abstract = {This paper is about sound and by extension the design of musical instruments through the window of shared play, memory, place, and materiality. It looks at NIME design within the context of folktales and storytelling. Exploring the design of a distributedmusical controller and its entangled use for performance andtabletop role-playing games that incorporate sound. What doesit mean for a musical performance to be a community or a gameto create a story on the one hand and be an instrument on theother?We play with this question through the design of a new musicalinstrument toolkit, zcreative, which is a set of autonomouslyentangled controls, forming a network of concurrent controllers,that manipulate a whole.zcreative is explored through three examples, considering whata NIME might be in an ever entangled web of interactions. FMfor 8 phones is a multi-channel spatial sound peformance, wherethe listeners are also performers; radical interaction opens up aNIME themed podcast through community listening; and pebblesis a sound driven tabletop role-playing game, where sound is firstclass and forms an additional creative axis for story telling.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {3},
 author = {Benedict Gaster and Nathan Renney},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20784038},
 editor = {Benedict Gaster and João Tragtenberg and Anna Xambó and Tom Mitchell},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {},
 numpages = {11},
 pages = {15--25},
 title = {Anywhere and here: zcreative a toolkit for distributed control},
 track = {Paper},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_3.pdf},
 urlsuppl1 = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_3_file01.wav},
 urlsuppl2 = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_3_file02.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}