RiTA Is Not An Instrument

Stephen Wolff

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

The default assumption in Western musical culture is that an instrument is an object that a player uses to make music: one person, one instrument, one set of expressive possibilities. This paper questions this from the perspective of a practitioner working outside academia.Drawing on five years of practice with RiTA, a browser-based shared soundboard built for Brighton & Hove Music for Connection(BHMC), I describe something that was not designed as an instrument, but was recognised as one by the community’s workshopfacilitators. RiTA has no single player, no clear boundary, and no existence independent of the community it serves. It was built to helplearning disabled musicians, older people, and refugees make music together during a pandemic, and it has since travelled to contextsincluding the British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage programme and the National Trust’s Changing Chalk project. UsingRiTA as a case study, we argue that instruments are better understood as entanglements of people, sounds, spaces, and organisationalstructures than as objects. Applying Conway’s Law, I suggest that different organisational structures naturally produce different kinds ofinstrument, and that widening the conversation about what instruments can be may require welcoming the organisations that produce them.

Citation

Stephen Wolff. 2026. RiTA Is Not An Instrument. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20741954 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_alt_7,
 abstract = {The default assumption in Western musical culture is that an instrument is an object that a player uses to make music: one person, one instrument, one set of expressive possibilities. This paper questions this from the perspective of a practitioner working outside academia.Drawing on five years of practice with RiTA, a browser-based shared soundboard built for Brighton & Hove Music for Connection(BHMC), I describe something that was not designed as an instrument, but was recognised as one by the community’s workshopfacilitators. RiTA has no single player, no clear boundary, and no existence independent of the community it serves. It was built to helplearning disabled musicians, older people, and refugees make music together during a pandemic, and it has since travelled to contextsincluding the British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage programme and the National Trust’s Changing Chalk project. UsingRiTA as a case study, we argue that instruments are better understood as entanglements of people, sounds, spaces, and organisationalstructures than as objects. Applying Conway’s Law, I suggest that different organisational structures naturally produce different kinds ofinstrument, and that widening the conversation about what instruments can be may require welcoming the organisations that produce them.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {7},
 author = {Stephen Wolff},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20741954},
 editor = {Allie Texeira Riggs and Giacomo Lepri and Yann Seznec},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {},
 numpages = {5},
 pages = {37--41},
 title = {RiTA Is Not An Instrument},
 track = {alt.nime},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_alt_7.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}