NIME 2014 (New Interfaces for Musical Expression)

The Open Day is an additional day to the conference programme beyond the core technical programme and is open to all registered delegates as well members of the general public free of charge. We hope with the Open Day to showcase NIME research to broader communities and industries, and in return, to feed back into the NIME community it self, late breaking developments in scholarly work, grassroots Do-It-Yourself activities, and the musical press.

Gender, Education, Creativity in Digital Music and Sound Art
Georgina Born, Kyle Devine, Sally-Jane Norman and Mark Taylor
University of Oxford, University of Sussex, University of Manchester

This panel broadly examines issues of gender in relation to both higher education and creative practices in the fields of electronic and computer music and sound art. The enormous growth of music technology degree provision in British Higher Education since the mid 1990s has been accompanied by a clear demographic bifurcation between music technology and traditional music degrees. Our goal is to set these research findings into dialogue with panelists and discussants concerned with issues of gender in relation to creative processes in terms of technological design and use as well as performance, installation and compositional practices. The workshop will therefore offer a basis on which to reflect on questions of gender within the NIME community and beyond.

Panelists include, in addition to the organisers,
Freida Abtan, Goldsmiths, University of London
Holly Ingleton, City University London
Cathy Lane, CRiSAP, University of the Arts, London
John Richards, De Montfort University
Laetitia Sonami, sound artist
Marie Thompson, Newcastle University
Simon Waters, Queen’s University Belfast


Organised by the MusDig project, http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk/musdig-nime-2014/

We are excited to announce a one day Hackathon hosted by Music Hackspace. Themed around assistive and adaptable musical interfaces for less abled players, the Hackathon will feature challenges presented by Heart n Soul and Drake Music. During the Hackathon there will also be talks, demos & performances by developers and music technologists on-stage. To reserve you place and for more information on the Hack-a-Thon challenges, please visit: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/nime2014-open-day-hackathon-tickets-11977857093

Tony Herrington, Editor-in-Chief of The Wire magazine, and Atau Tanaka, NIME general co-chair with Rebecca Fiebrink, will hold a follow up conversation to a discussion started in January for the Made in Goldsmiths series. They will hold an informal discussion with a chance for audience questions.

The mission of the Technology Café is to open channels of communication between the NIME attendees, the public at large, and companies manufacturing musical interfaces, instruments and software. This will represent an excellent recruitment opportunity for studends and young researchers interested in jobs in industry. Confirmed comapnies who will exhibit  products and presentations include  Seaboard, Alpha Sphere, IK Multimedia, Mogees, Hoxton OWL / Music Hackspace, IRCAM, Native Instruments, Warp Records, FXpansion, Tim Exile, Yuli Levtov, Patchblocks, Create Digital Music, Oscilla.

MOCO@NIME14: Movement and Computing meets Musical Interactions
Frédéric Bevilacqua, Sarah Fdili Alaoui, Jules Françoise, Philippe Pasquier and Thecla Schiphorst
IRCAM CNRS UMR STMS UPMC, Paris, France; Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada

The Moco panel bridges interdisciplinary communities in movement, computing, music and interaction. We will present the outcomes of a workshop called MOCO2014 (Movement and Computing) premiering at Ircam in Paris in June 2014. Although the primary target of MOCO is movement and computing, we address a community that overlaps with the NIME community, sharing topics on expressivity, embodied interaction, interactive machine learning, compositional modeling and generative systems to name a few. We are interested in creating a dialogue between researchers and artists involved in these communities, as well as the larger community interested in the intersection between arts, science and technology. The panel will include contributors to MOCO alongside researchers and artists in the NIME community that explore the space between sound and movement. Our goal is to share research concepts and to develop future relationships that will be beneficial to both communities.  Friday 4th July from 3-6pm, Goldsmiths Cinema

The UnConference will take place during a special open day of activities on July 4th. 3pm-6pm in Richard Hoggart Building (RHB) rooms 309, 307, and 2.107.
The UnConference is an informal gathering of artists, thinkers, dreamers, and other troublemakers all focused on digital technologies, electronic arts, and new interfaces for musical expression. Participants will have the opportunity to share their work with peers in an informal setting.  Composers, artists, and technologists are invited to bring both finished
work and work in progress for critique. Suggest a workshop or present your ideas! The UnConference will serve as a place for discussion of emerging topics at NIME.

To present in the UnConference, please submit a 1-page abstract of your topic that can appear on the website of the New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference. If you require any technical assistance other than the use of a projector and speaker system, please also include a detailed technical description of your needs. An OpenJack concert will follow the UnConference​ sessions, in which can be featured performances.
All submissions must be sent electronically to nime2014unconference@goldsmithsdigital.com by June 10th 2014.

Participants at the UnConference will not be required to register for the New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference unless they wish to attend the NIME papers and events from July 1-4.

New NIME’s are presented at the NIME conference but what becomes of them afterwards? The aim of the Open Jack is to put different NIME’s together in a session to show how they function in an improvisational setting that is not too prepared. In this session we combine NIME instruments with some traditional instruments and live electronics. The pool of participants in the Open Jack will form different formations, based on their own preferences, in which they will play a number of improvisations. In order to guarantee the quality and purpose of the evening we expect the participating musicians to:

• be experienced (group) improvisors that are versatile in a number of styles.


• use live electronics as an integral and expressive part of the instrument or to have good command of extended techniques on an acoustic instrument that makes blending with live electronics a natural musical action.


• bring NIME instruments that they actually play if they can lay their hands on them.


• have a flexible personality…

If you want to be part of the Open Jack you can send an email to Hans Leeuw: hans@electrumpet.nl
Hans Leeuw, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay and Palle Dahlstedt will form the backbone for this session.