Solstice: A new work centred on music, bridging disciplines and creative freedom with instruments

Iran Sanadzadeh, and Luna Valentin

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

Solstice is a 40-minute performance work for double bass, spatial audio, gestural controllers, and augmented instruments, developed by two interdisciplinary practitioners working across distinct musical and technical communities. The piece emerged from a shared decision to prioritise musical goals, and to treat tool-building as a means of sustaining musical creativity and artistic exploration beyond demonstration of technical proficiency. This musical work resists demo-driven narratives common in NIME by prioritizing long-form continuity, relational listening, and collaboration over novelty or interface legibility. Musical form is shaped through an extended, process based in development in the performance space itself, that combines stable, long-term instruments (the pressure-sensitive Floors, an augmented contrabass, the CAVIAR control system) with provisional and reconfigurable objects (bows, mallets, contact microphones, a prototype soundcatcher, spring reverb). These elements remain available for re-interpretation across rehearsal and performance. We frame the artwork through the thesis that musical agency is distributed across body, instrument, space, and relationship; the goals of this work unfold through development. In Solstice, acoustics is treated as an active creative agent. Agency is experienced relationally, distributed across bodies, instruments, space. This paper reflects on how such relational practices can support coherent long-form performance within NIME contexts, and how resisting demo-driven teleologies may open space for works where sound, duration, and vulnerability of performers in open engagement with the audience remain central.

Citation

Iran Sanadzadeh, and Luna Valentin. 2026. Solstice: A new work centred on music, bridging disciplines and creative freedom with instruments. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20784290 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_96,
 abstract = {Solstice is a 40-minute performance work for double bass, spatial audio, gestural controllers, and augmented instruments, developed by two interdisciplinary practitioners working across distinct musical and technical communities. The piece emerged from a shared decision to prioritise musical goals, and to treat tool-building as a means of sustaining musical creativity and artistic exploration beyond demonstration of technical proficiency. This musical work resists demo-driven narratives common in NIME by prioritizing long-form continuity, relational listening, and collaboration over novelty or interface legibility. Musical form is shaped through an extended, process based in development in the performance space itself, that combines stable, long-term instruments (the pressure-sensitive Floors, an augmented contrabass, the CAVIAR control system) with provisional and reconfigurable objects (bows, mallets, contact microphones, a prototype soundcatcher, spring reverb). These elements remain available for re-interpretation across rehearsal and performance. We frame the artwork through the thesis that musical agency is distributed across body, instrument, space, and relationship; the goals of this work unfold through development. In Solstice, acoustics is treated as an active creative agent. Agency is experienced relationally, distributed across bodies, instruments, space. This paper reflects on how such relational practices can support coherent long-form performance within NIME contexts, and how resisting demo-driven teleologies may open space for works where sound, duration, and vulnerability of performers in open engagement with the audience remain central.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {96},
 author = {Iran Sanadzadeh and Luna Valentin},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20784290},
 editor = {Benedict Gaster and João Tragtenberg and Anna Xambó and Tom Mitchell},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {},
 numpages = {8},
 pages = {812--819},
 title = {Solstice: A new work centred on music, bridging disciplines and creative freedom with instruments},
 track = {paper},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_96.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}