Looking NIME in the ‘I’: Tracing the social life of digital musical instruments

S. M. Astrid Bin

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

For 25 years, the NIME community has built digital musical instruments (DMIs), yet discourse remains tethered to technical definitions or subjective evaluations of 'success.' This paper argues that instrumentality is not a stable property defined by sound, gesture, or form, but rather an emergent quality shaped by cultural, social, and technological contexts. I introduce an analytical exercise that identifies 'loci of influence' (object, technology, performer, spectators, community, and commerce) to trace how a DMI functions as an instrument in practice. I apply this exercise to three contrasting examples (the bespoke Chaos Bells, the software environment Max, and the commercial MiMU Gloves), thereby demonstrating how this framework allows for the objective comparison of technologies with vastly different scales and social trajectories. This perspective offers a tool for articulating the cultural life of instruments on their own terms, moving beyond fixed definitions of 'instrument', constructed frameworks, or personal preference to understand the diverse ways instrumentality is assembled in the world.

Citation

S. M. Astrid Bin. 2026. Looking NIME in the ‘I’: Tracing the social life of digital musical instruments. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20784285 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_94,
 abstract = {For 25 years, the NIME community has built digital musical instruments (DMIs), yet discourse remains tethered to technical definitions or subjective evaluations of 'success.' This paper argues that instrumentality is not a stable property defined by sound, gesture, or form, but rather an emergent quality shaped by cultural, social, and technological contexts. I introduce an analytical exercise that identifies 'loci of influence' (object, technology, performer, spectators, community, and commerce) to trace how a DMI functions as an instrument in practice. I apply this exercise to three contrasting examples (the bespoke Chaos Bells, the software environment Max, and the commercial MiMU Gloves), thereby demonstrating how this framework allows for the objective comparison of technologies with vastly different scales and social trajectories. This perspective offers a tool for articulating the cultural life of instruments on their own terms, moving beyond fixed definitions of 'instrument', constructed frameworks, or personal preference to understand the diverse ways instrumentality is assembled in the world.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {94},
 author = {S. M. Astrid Bin},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20784285},
 editor = {Benedict Gaster and João Tragtenberg and Anna Xambó and Tom Mitchell},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {},
 numpages = {7},
 pages = {798--804},
 title = {Looking NIME in the ‘I’: Tracing the social life of digital musical instruments},
 track = {paper},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_94.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}