ritus wired sacerdos - Ritualistic NIME

Nicholas Shaheed, and Héloïse Garry

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

Across cultures and historical periods, collective sound practices have structured ritual life. Circles of bodies and voices and repeated gestures have long served as interfaces for binding communities together, mediating relationships between individuals and forces perceived as larger than themselves. Anthropological accounts of ritual, from liturgy and chant to shamanic invocation and communal song, reveal a shared grammar: repetition, cyclical time, call-and-response structures, and the transformation of individual voices into a collective sonic body.Within such contexts, sound does not merely communicate meaning; it produces social and symbolic order. The voice, in particular, occupies a privileged position. When amplified through choral repetition or ritual mediation, it becomes detached from singular authorship and re-emerges as something collective, authoritative, or transcendent. Technological cultures have not abandoned these structures. Rather, they frequently reproduce them in new forms. Gatherings centered around electronic instruments, speaker arrays, and computational systems often replicate ritualistic patterns of congregation. In these contexts, machines and interfaces may function as focal objects around which collective sonic experience is organized.Within this perspective, we ask: what are the intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic boundaries of NIME? If musical interfaces mediate collective sonic practices, can they also participate in ritual structures? Can technological systems become objects of symbolic focus, or even forms of contemporary idolization? Rather than offering answers, the work proposes a speculative anthropological lens through which the culture of musical interface research might be reconsidered: as a space where technology and musical expression intersect with human rituals of gathering, invocation, and shared sonic experience.

Citation

Nicholas Shaheed, and Héloïse Garry. 2026. ritus wired sacerdos - Ritualistic NIME. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20741980 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_alt_14,
 abstract = {Across cultures and historical periods, collective sound practices have structured ritual life. Circles of bodies and voices and repeated gestures have long served as interfaces for binding communities together, mediating relationships between individuals and forces perceived as larger than themselves. Anthropological accounts of ritual, from liturgy and chant to shamanic invocation and communal song, reveal a shared grammar: repetition, cyclical time, call-and-response structures, and the transformation of individual voices into a collective sonic body.Within such contexts, sound does not merely communicate meaning; it produces social and symbolic order. The voice, in particular, occupies a privileged position. When amplified through choral repetition or ritual mediation, it becomes detached from singular authorship and re-emerges as something collective, authoritative, or transcendent. Technological cultures have not abandoned these structures. Rather, they frequently reproduce them in new forms. Gatherings centered around electronic instruments, speaker arrays, and computational systems often replicate ritualistic patterns of congregation. In these contexts, machines and interfaces may function as focal objects around which collective sonic experience is organized.Within this perspective, we ask: what are the intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic boundaries of NIME? If musical interfaces mediate collective sonic practices, can they also participate in ritual structures? Can technological systems become objects of symbolic focus, or even forms of contemporary idolization? Rather than offering answers, the work proposes a speculative anthropological lens through which the culture of musical interface research might be reconsidered: as a space where technology and musical expression intersect with human rituals of gathering, invocation, and shared sonic experience. },
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {14},
 author = {Nicholas Shaheed and Héloïse Garry},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20741980},
 editor = {Allie Texeira Riggs and Giacomo Lepri and Yann Seznec},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {},
 numpages = {3},
 pages = {79--81},
 presentation-video = {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy2pM-R1-6k},
 title = {ritus wired sacerdos - Ritualistic NIME},
 track = {alt.nime},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_alt_14.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}