NIME 2005: New Interfaces for Musical Expression (review)

This year's New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference, NIME 2005, was held at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, 26–28 May. Although practically everyone disagreed about the pronunciation of the name of the conference, everyone agreed that Sidney Fels and Tina Blaine did a wonderful job of coordinating the event. The spaces for papers and performances were physically and acoustically beautiful, and the weather was perfectly gorgeous, which made it a pleasure to walk from the dorm-like accommodations through the campus to the various venues.

Thursday May 26, Reviewed by Jamie Allen

There was a refreshing preamble to the official commencement of NIME 2005. Wednesday night before the official welcome session the next morning, early arrivals were treated to a showing of The Future is Not What It Used to be, a film by Mika Taanila presented by Michael Lyons. The film was a real treat, outlining the extensive accomplishments and contributions of Finland's obscure electronic arts pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi. Mr. Taanila's film also hinted at an emphasis on historical and contextual underpinnings that I noticed throughout the proceedings this year.

Three separate keynote speeches were given during each morning of the conference, an aspect of the event that was particularly well planned. Each of these was a retrospective look at the speaker's own work, and their perspectives on the road ahead. The nearly sublime triumvirate of Don Buchla, Golan Levin, and Bill Buxton truly represents a triumph of curatorial talent and orchestration on the part of the conference planners, Sidney Fels and Tina Blaine.

On this first morning, Mr. Buchla presented and demonstrated a panoply of the instruments he has constructed since 1965. The number of demonstrable instruments he was able to bring was limited somewhat by Canada customs agents, but his corner of the demo room was still well stocked. The keynote was fascinating, especially for those of us with leanings towards fetishism for synthesizer and analog memorabilia. He capped his remarks with comments on modern advancements and work in hardware design. This included mention of a very recently completed design by Bob Huott known as the "Been." Its mention was a surprise even to the designer, as the instrument is so new, confirming that Mr. Buchla's attentiveness to his chosen field has not waned in over 45 years of practice.

The morning session of paper presentations began with a look at more conceptual treatments as contrasted to specific applications, which were covered in the afternoon. John Bowers and Phil Archer presented "Not Hyper, Not Meta, Not Cyber but Infra Instruments." The presentation covered much of Bowers and Archer's work and called for a restriction of interactive potential in new instruments (NIMEs). Essentially, it was a well-formulated argument for "keeping it simple." The lesson was a profound and important one for the audience at hand, that sometimes the most expressive musical outcomes are derived from seemingly less-expressive interfaces (Infra-Instruments). "Reductionist" Japanese work and "circuit bending" performance successes prove that Infra-Instruments are as much a part of the novel ways people are expressing their musical voice as the most belabored virtual reality application or re-engineered violin.

Three researchers from Helsinki's University of Technology came next, presenting a set of experiments in sound control done within a Virtual Reality environment. Identifying with the largely synesthetic leanings of North American computer music composers and researchers, they gave a concise description of the CAVE environment and input interfaces, standard in virtual reality (VR) circles but novel in their application to the musical domain. The work did not seem geared to performance contexts, but to the context of a singular user, creating and interacting with a virtual instrument or sound world. As with all presentations of immersive systems, I would have liked to experience the VR system in its entirety myself, as video and photographic documents rarely do them justice.

The three paper presentations that followed were discussions...