ReImagining: Cross-cultural Co-Creation of a Chinese Traditional Musical Instrument with Digital Technologies

Nick Bryan-Kinns, and LI ZIJIN

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

There are many studies of Digital Musical Instrument (DMI) design, but there is little research on the cross-cultural co-creation of DMIs drawing on traditional musical instruments. We present a study of cross-cultural co-creation inspired by the Duxianqin - a traditional Chinese Jing ethnic minority single stringed musical instrument. We report on how we structured the co-creation with European and Chinese participants ranging from DMI designers to composers and performers. We discuss how we identified the `essence' of the Duxianqin and used this to drive co-creation of three Duxianqin reimagined through digital technologies. Music was specially composed for these reimagined Duxianqin and performed in public as the culmination of the design process. We reflect on our co-creation process and how others could use such an approach to identify the essence of traditional instruments and reimagine them in the digital age.

Citation:

Nick Bryan-Kinns, and LI ZIJIN. 2020. ReImagining: Cross-cultural Co-Creation of a Chinese Traditional Musical Instrument with Digital Technologies. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4813428

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{NIME20_75,
 abstract = {There are many studies of Digital Musical Instrument (DMI) design, but there is little research on the cross-cultural co-creation of DMIs drawing on traditional musical instruments. We present a study of cross-cultural co-creation inspired by the Duxianqin - a traditional Chinese Jing ethnic minority single stringed musical instrument. We report on how we structured the co-creation with European and Chinese participants ranging from DMI designers to composers and performers. We discuss how we identified the `essence' of the Duxianqin and used this to drive co-creation of three Duxianqin reimagined through digital technologies. Music was specially composed for these reimagined Duxianqin and performed in public as the culmination of the design process. We reflect on our co-creation process and how others could use such an approach to identify the essence of traditional instruments and reimagine them in the digital age.},
 address = {Birmingham, UK},
 author = {Bryan-Kinns, Nick and ZIJIN, LI},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.4813428},
 editor = {Romain Michon and Franziska Schroeder},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {July},
 pages = {382--387},
 presentation-video = {https://youtu.be/NvHcUQea82I},
 publisher = {Birmingham City University},
 title = {ReImagining: Cross-cultural Co-Creation of a Chinese Traditional Musical Instrument with Digital Technologies},
 url = {https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2020/nime2020_paper75.pdf},
 year = {2020}
}