Outlandish Lullaby as a Counter-Listening Device: Rest, Untranslatability, and Intimate Estrangement in NIME

Jiyou Park

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

The alt.NIME submission for Outlandish Lullaby presents the work as an interactive sound art piece that seeks to establish a new discourse within NIME, redirecting focus from control-based interaction to the politics of listening. The conceptual foundation of the piece draws from two related experiences: listening to Buddhist scripture chanting during childhood, where the sounds were known yet the words continued incomprehensible, and engaging with multilingual conversations in New York, where the language was only partially understood but held substantial emotional meaning.The piece is structured as a listening environment in which the incomprehensibility of the voices is not regarded as a limitation. Instead, it creates a sense of comfort, co-presence, and spatial distance with the voices. While the user cannot comprehend the language, they are able to manipulate the metric density, the multilingual voices, and the perceived proximity of the voices. I characterize this as a counter-listening device, serving as an interface for engaging with incomprehensibility rather than striving for comprehensibility.

Citation

Jiyou Park. 2026. Outlandish Lullaby as a Counter-Listening Device: Rest, Untranslatability, and Intimate Estrangement in NIME. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20741964 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_alt_9,
 abstract = {The alt.NIME submission for Outlandish Lullaby presents the work as an interactive sound art piece that seeks to establish a new discourse within NIME, redirecting focus from control-based interaction to the politics of listening. The conceptual foundation of the piece draws from two related experiences: listening to Buddhist scripture chanting during childhood, where the sounds were known yet the words continued incomprehensible, and engaging with multilingual conversations in New York, where the language was only partially understood but held substantial emotional meaning.The piece is structured as a listening environment in which the incomprehensibility of the voices is not regarded as a limitation. Instead, it creates a sense of comfort, co-presence, and spatial distance with the voices. While the user cannot comprehend the language, they are able to manipulate the metric density, the multilingual voices, and the perceived proximity of the voices. I characterize this as a counter-listening device, serving as an interface for engaging with incomprehensibility rather than striving for comprehensibility.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {9},
 author = {Jiyou Park},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20741964},
 editor = {Allie Texeira Riggs and Giacomo Lepri and Yann Seznec},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {},
 numpages = {3},
 pages = {43--45},
 presentation-video = {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWx3eO4B_Mk},
 title = {Outlandish Lullaby as a Counter-Listening Device: Rest, Untranslatability, and Intimate Estrangement in NIME},
 track = {alt.nime},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_alt_9.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}