Nimble Finger Studies/Etudes Digitales

Jocelyn Ho, Sofy Yuditskaya, and Margaret Schedel

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

Nimble Finger Studies / Études Digitales is a two-movement performance work for a trio of custom-built textile-based digital musical instruments: Electromagnetic (EM Hoops, Baremin Embroidery Hoops, and the Magnetic Memory Rushnyk. The title draws on the historically gendered and racialised anglophonic discourse of “nimble fingers” in electronics and craft labour, a term that has been used to naturalise repetitive, small-scale bodily work as feminine, compliant, and unskilled. The work is part of an ongoing multi-year feminist research–creation project that repurposes domestic and craft tools as digital musical instruments for composition, installation, and performance. In Study 1, each performer plays a three-hoop Baremin instrument built around an Arduino-based capacitive and electromagnetic sensing system. A stitched embroidery hoop functions as a touch- and proximity-sensitive antenna that controls a continuously variable Baremin sound engine. The audio output is routed to a hand stitched copper-wire loudspeaker embedded in a second embroidery hoop, while a third hoop containing an electromagnetic pickup captures the speaker’s low-level field. The instrument is performed bimanually: one hand shapes pitch through hovering and touch on the antenna hoop, while the other hand positions the pickup hoop over the stitched speaker to control amplitude and timbral variation. Performance material is organised as etude-like patterns of pressing, brushing, tracing and hovering, foregrounding speed, endurance and micro-control, and reframing virtuosity as an accumulation of micromovements rather than large theatrical gesture. Study 2 brings the Baremin Embroidery Hoops into dialogue with Magnetic Memory Rushnyk, a wall-hung textile instrument constructed from a traditional East Slavic rushnyk into which magnetic cores and control voltage lines are woven. The same EM Hoops are used to navigate the Rushnyk’s surface, discovering resonance, interference and beating through proximity, orientation and slow tracing movement. In contrast to the table-based micromovement focus of Study 1, sound in Study 2 emerges through collective spatial navigation and listening. Slow, drone-like grooves stabilise and fracture as performers follow the tactility, weight and flow of the textile, treating the Rushnyk as a fixed spatial field whose sonic behaviour must be learned through movement. Across both studies, Nimble Finger Studies / Études Digitales stages highly focused fingerwork—both in performance and in the fabrication of the textile interfaces themselves—as the primary site of musical agency. The work responds to calls to account for how electronic music practices remain entangled with the disciplined, gendered bodily labour that underpins the material production of electronic technologies, while proposing textile-based, field-driven instruments as sites for listening, memory and feminist re-articulation of virtuosity.

Citation

Jocelyn Ho, Sofy Yuditskaya, and Margaret Schedel. 2026. Nimble Finger Studies/Etudes Digitales. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20782106 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_music_28,
 abstract = {Nimble Finger Studies / Études Digitales is a two-movement performance work for a trio of custom-built textile-based digital musical instruments: Electromagnetic (EM Hoops, Baremin Embroidery Hoops, and the Magnetic Memory Rushnyk. The title draws on the historically gendered and racialised anglophonic discourse of “nimble fingers” in electronics and craft labour, a term that has been used to naturalise repetitive, small-scale bodily work as feminine, compliant, and unskilled. The work is part of an ongoing multi-year feminist research–creation project that repurposes domestic and craft tools as digital musical instruments for composition, installation, and performance. In Study 1, each performer plays a three-hoop Baremin instrument built around an Arduino-based capacitive and electromagnetic sensing system. A stitched embroidery hoop functions as a touch- and proximity-sensitive antenna that controls a continuously variable Baremin sound engine. The audio output is routed to a hand stitched copper-wire loudspeaker embedded in a second embroidery hoop, while a third hoop containing an electromagnetic pickup captures the speaker’s low-level field. The instrument is performed bimanually: one hand shapes pitch through hovering and touch on the antenna hoop, while the other hand positions the pickup hoop over the stitched speaker to control amplitude and timbral variation. Performance material is organised as etude-like patterns of pressing, brushing, tracing and hovering, foregrounding speed, endurance and micro-control, and reframing virtuosity as an accumulation of micromovements rather than large theatrical gesture. Study 2 brings the Baremin Embroidery Hoops into dialogue with Magnetic Memory Rushnyk, a wall-hung textile instrument constructed from a traditional East Slavic rushnyk into which magnetic cores and control voltage lines are woven. The same EM Hoops are used to navigate the Rushnyk’s surface, discovering resonance, interference and beating through proximity, orientation and slow tracing movement. In contrast to the table-based micromovement focus of Study 1, sound in Study 2 emerges through collective spatial navigation and listening. Slow, drone-like grooves stabilise and fracture as performers follow the tactility, weight and flow of the textile, treating the Rushnyk as a fixed spatial field whose sonic behaviour must be learned through movement. Across both studies, Nimble Finger Studies / Études Digitales stages highly focused fingerwork—both in performance and in the fabrication of the textile interfaces themselves—as the primary site of musical agency. The work responds to calls to account for how electronic music practices remain entangled with the disciplined, gendered bodily labour that underpins the material production of electronic technologies, while proposing textile-based, field-driven instruments as sites for listening, memory and feminist re-articulation of virtuosity.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {28},
 author = {Jocelyn Ho and Sofy Yuditskaya and Margaret Schedel},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20782106},
 editor = {Lia Mice and Nicole Robson and Tara Pattenden},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {Live Performance},
 numpages = {4},
 pages = {115--118},
 presentation-video = {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNA01GRFE0s},
 title = {Nimble Finger Studies/Etudes Digitales},
 track = {Music},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_music_28.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}