Workshops will be held on Monday 30th June and are either full day sessions (10am – 5pm), or half day sessions (10am – 1pm).
Workshops require 1) Application to the workshop directly with its organisers, and 2) Registration for at least one day of the conference running Tuesday to Thursday. There is no additional fee for the workshops.
To apply for a workshop, please refer to the individual workshop’s call for participation webpage and follow the instructions.
Alex McLean
Marco Gillies
Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut
NIME2014 Workshop Co-chairs
FULL DAY WORKSHOPS
Practice-Based Research in New Interfaces for Musical Expression
Monday 30th June, 9:30am – 5pm *please note earlier start*
Andrew Johnston, Sam Ferguson and Ernest Edmonds
Creativity and Cognition Studios, University of Technology, Sydney
http://www.creativityandcognition.com/NIMEWorkshop/
Practitioner-researchers in new musical instrument/interface design often set themselves multiple challenges: they seek to design and implement new technologies, create and perform new works, examine and evaluate what they have done and, finally, articulate what has been learned in the process.
To do this effectively requires careful consideration of the links between creative work and research. Failing to do so can lead to technical research which lacks relevance to creative practice or, conversely, creative work where the broader contribution is unclear.
This workshop focuses on the relationships between creative practice and research – and blends of the two – with particular emphasis on new musical interface/instrument design.
AccessNIME
Monday 30th June, 10am – 5pm
Sile O’Modhrain, Conor Barry, Tony Stockman, Nick Bryan-kinns, Fiore Martin, Oussama Metatla, Atau Tanaka and Adam Parkinson
DePIC (Design Patterns for Inclusive Collaboration): Goldsmiths, Queen Mary University of London & University of Michigan
http://depic.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/accessnime/
This one day workshop will explore both the accessibility of NIMEs and what NIME technology and research can bring to accessibility of audio interfaces and performance, primarily focusing on practitioners with visual impairments.
This will take the shape of a day-long workshop, structured around demonstrations of technologies, exchanges of skills and ideas, short presentations of research with individual approaches to workflow and accessibility. There will also be hands-on tutorial in which participants build and program an interactive system, giving them experience working with NIME-related technologies that they can extend into their own practices. We believe that the NIME field offers many opportunities for developing interfaces which allow multi-modal or cross-modal access to DAWs, or to interact with DAWs using different modalities to those normally used. Haptic devices, for instance, can allow users to ‘feel’ things that might only normally be visually represented. This has the great potential to open up access to DAWs, regular studio practice and interactive music, for those who have different senses available to them. In addition, it remains a problem that within the NIME field accessibility is generally an unaddressed issue. Much software used by NIME practitioners – such as Max MSP or Pure Data – remains relatively inaccessible. Even more commercial software often relies on dedicated user bases to maintain its accessibility through myriad updates of operating systems.
Sonic Bikes
Monday 30th June, 10am – 5pm
Kaffe Matthews, Dave Griffiths and Jeremy Keenan
The Bicrophonic Research Institute (BRI), London
URL: tbc
The NIME BRI workshop will present the sonic bicycle as instrument as well as the research made behind the technical achievements reached to make the ‘Pedalling Games’ playing in the park during the conference (The Pedalling Games has been commissioned by NIME).
The workshop’s aim will be to present an open lab for conference delegates/participants to input on different kinds of interactivity between bikes and how these sonically (and even visually) could be developed and used for musical outcome by pedalling alone and together. 5 sonic bikes will be available for participants to try on the lawn or tennis court beside the conference centre and participants could possibly be able to bring their own bikes for sonic augmentation. Participants will be able to feedback their experience and offer technical or philosophical input as to how the sonic bike could be improved/developed/altered.
HALF DAY WORKSHOPS
Interactive Music Notation and Representation
Monday 30th June, 9:30am – 1pm *please note earlier start*
Dominique Fober, Jean Bresson, Pierre Couprie, Yann Geslin, Richard Hoadley
Various – France and UK
http://notation.afim-asso.org/doku.php/evenements/2014-06-30-nimew
Computer music tools for music notation have long been restricted to conventional approaches and dominated by a few systems, mainly oriented towards music engraving. During the last decade and driven by artistic and technological evolutions, new tools and new forms of music representation have emerged. The recent advent of systems like Bach, MaxScore or INScore (to cite just a few), clearly indicates that computer music notation tools have become mature enough to diverge from traditional approaches and to explore new domains and usages such as interactive and live notation.
The aim of the workshop is to gather artists, researchers and application developers, to compare the views and the needs inspired by contemporary practices, with a specific focus on interactive and live music, including representational forms emerging from live coding. Special consideration will be given to new instrumental forms emerging from the NIME community.
Keyboard Salon: Connecting Instrument Designers and Artistic Practitioners
Monday 30th June: 2pm – 5pm
Xiao Xiao, Andrew McPherson and Thomas Walther
MIT Media Lab, Queen Mary University of London, Technische Univeritat Munchen
http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~andrewm/keyboard-workshop.html
We invite contributions from pianists and from designers of keyboard-related musical interfaces for a workshop on extended keyboard performance. In recent years, many new keyboard-related instruments have been developed in and around the NIME community. These instruments have the potential to be used by a large worldwide community of trained pianists. However, typical conference presentations and concerts rarely offer sufficient opportunity for performers to explore these new instruments.
This workshop will bring together instrument builders and piano/keyboard performers to explore new artistic uses of keyboard-related technologies in a relaxed and open setting. The workshop will strongly focus on the experience of performing with new keyboard technologies. As such, we are looking for instruments with applicability to expert-level live performance. Instruments with a track record of previous performances are especially welcome. Likewise, we welcome the participation of pianists with an interest in contemporary performance practice, whether or not this practice has previously involved electronics. The goal of the workshop will be to facilitate the exchange of ideas between performers and designers, so participants should come prepared to explore other technologies and artistic ideas as well as presenting their own.
Human Harp
Monday 30th June: 10am – 1pm
Di Mainstone, Becky Stewart and Adam Stark
Various Worldwide
URL: http://humanharp.org/london-goldsmiths-workshop/
The Human Harp is a project led by artist Di Mainstone with hardware and software engineering by Becky Stewart and Adam Stark. The project draws inspiration from suspension bridges and explores how they can be transformed into musical instruments through augmentation with physical computing interfaces. The proposed workshop will lead participants through the hardware and software central to the installation – in particular the hardware string interface and the sound generation software. Participants will get hands-on experience programming and testing the Arduino-based hardware and then a guided tour through the software generating the audio.
Learning to Program Haptic Interactions with Max: Applications with Sound
Monday 30th June, 10am – 1pm
Edgar Berdahl and Alexandros Kontogeorgakopoulos
Louisiana State University, Cardiff School of Art and Design
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/learning-to-program-haptic-interactions-using-max-applications-with-sound-tickets-11441165835
In this workshop, participants will learn how to program force-feedback haptic interactions in Max. During the workshop, each participant will borrow a FireFader haptic device with the option of purchasing it at the end of the workshop. This workshop aims to get participants easily up to speed by examining simple example haptic interactions in the familiar Max programming environment. Many of these examples are based on physical models and leverage Max’s palette of visualization objects to help communicate the means of operation to participants. More advanced examples help provide participants with specific insight into how haptics can be integrated into novel music compositions and sound art. Several music compositions will be used as examples: “Metronom,” “Transmogrified Strings”, “Engraving–Hammering–Casting,” and “When The Robots Get Loose.” Come support open-source software and open-source hardware!
A NIME Primer
Monday 30th June: 10am – 1pm
Michael Lyons and Sidney Fels
Ritsumeikan University, Japan and University of Columbia, Canada
http://www.kasrl.org/nime_primer_2014.pdf
Attending NIME for the first time can be an overwhelming experience. Beginners may find it difficult to make sense of the vast array of topics presented during the busy program of talks and posters, or appreciate the significance of the wide variety of demos and concerts. This half-day tutorial is intended to provide a general and gentle introduction to the theory and practice of the design of interactive systems for music creation and performance.
Our target audience consists of newcomers to the field who would like to start research projects, as well as interested students, people from other fields and members of the public with a general interest in the potential of NIME. We aim to give our audience an entry point to the theory and practice of musical interface design by drawing on case studies from previous years of the conference. Past attendees of the tutorial have told us that they gained a helpful perspective that helped them to increase their understanding and appreciation of their first NIME.
Musical Metacreation Tutorial (MUME)
Monday 30th June: 2pm – 5pm
Philippe Pasquier, Arne Eigenfeldt and Oliver Bown
Simon Fraser University and University of Sydney
http://www.metacreation.net/mume-nime2014/tutorial/
This three hour tutorial aims at introducing the field of musical metacreation (MUME) and its current developments, promises, and challenges, with a particular focus on NIME-relevant aspects of the field.
Thanks to continued progress in artistic and scientific research, a new possibility has emerged in our musical relationship with technology: Musical Metacreation. MUME involves using tools and techniques from artificial intelligence, artificial life, and machine learning, themselves often inspired by cognitive and life sciences, to endow machines with musical creativity. Concretely, it brings together artists, practitioners and researchers interested in developing systems that autonomously (or interactively) recognize, learn, represent, compose, complete, accompany, or interpret musical data.
Besides introducing the field of musical metacreation (MUME) and its current developments, the tutorial will bring to the front NIME-relevant aspects of the field, such as: musical interfaces for the collaboration between human performers and creative software “partners”, the development of interfaces and instrument that foster and support computer-assisted musical creativity.