2015: Fourteen Years of NIME: The Value and Meaning of ‘Community’ in Interactive Music Research

Abstract

This paper examines the notion of community as commonly employed within NIME discourses. Our aim is to clarify and define the term through the community of practice framework. We argue that through its formal use and application, the notion of community becomes a significant space for the examination of emergent musical practices that could otherwise be overlooked. This paper defines community of practice, as originally developed in the social sciences by Lave and Wenger, and applies it within the NIME context through the examination of existing communities of practice such as the laptop performance community, laptop orchestras, as well as the Satellite CCRMA and Patchblocks communities.

Appendices

Author Commentary: Moving Forward—Notes on Participation, Diversity and Social Mediation in the NIME Community

Adnan Marquez-Borbon and Paul Stapleton

The “community of practice framework” outlined in our paper is one of many lenses available to better understand the value and meaning of community in the context of NIME. Regardless of the specific methods employed, NIME (as a conference and as a maturing community of interest) is now at the stage where it must urgently reflect on its motivations, values and future priorities. As a “community-of-communities,” NIME’s mix of disciplines, methodologies, outputs and proclaimed openness to diversity has been widely celebrated. It is clear that the diverse and ad hoc nature of NIME has provided an effective starting point for bringing together cross-disciplinary expertise around the necessarily interdisciplinary field of interactive music technologies. However, the lack of coherent vision and critical reflection across NIME’s various interest groups acts to marginalize or exclude individuals and collectives whose practices are not already supported by dominant social norms. Not all actors in NIME are speaking from the same position of power, and an openness to diversity does not automatically result in other voices being heard.

The need for a broadening of focus beyond questions such as design implementation to include “questions of power, authority, legitimacy, participation, and intelligibility” (Irani et al. 2010) is exemplified by an increase in reference to philosophy of technology, critical theory and social aesthetics at NIME’s parent Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). We argue that both NIME and CHI have much to gain from a more widespread adoption of “aesthetic and cultural reasoning” (Bardzell 2009), particularly if our aim is to foster an inclusive community that more accurately reflects the growing diversity of social practices which adopt and adapt technologies for creative and political ends.

Recent attempts to raise the visibility of marginalized groups within NIME (e.g. Born and Devine 2015) have resulted in conversations which begin to productively address the power dynamics at play in our broader community. Although it is clear that NIME is mediated by wider social inequalities (e.g. gender, ethnicity and class), it is likewise mediated by institutional structures that privilege different methods of knowing and doing. The decreasing representation of practice-based research in the NIME literature, in place of “technical and scientific reporting,” has been recently documented by Gurevich (2015). He further argues that the current tension between these research paradigms is unnecessary, yet remains inevitable without clearer explication of “what could constitute legitimacy within the PBR community,” and how this contingent and heterogeneous approach might “interface” with the more established and generalizable principles and methods of science. Similarly, Green (2015) argues that practice-led research can be “complementary to quantitative, controlled-condition methods” by augmenting the “generality of observation” found in these methods “in order to contend with musical practice in local, socially entangled, contentious and noisy complexity.” Green laments that, despite the great potential NIME offers for a productive interdisciplinary convergence, NIME attempts to engage with music performance with little recognition of the “wider issues” of performance practice.

For us, it is clear that performance is the biggest casualty caused by a lack of rigorous critical reflection and communication across different areas of the NIME community. While new musical interfaces, systems or sensing devices are performed with each year, those from past conferences are at best recalled through anecdotes or as paper citations. Very few technological developments survive outside of NIME, or even within NIME over time. We suspect the primary cause is a lack of connection to sustained and emerging real world performance practices, and a lack of engagement with academic and professional communities that sustain these practices. The “N” in NIME itself is perhaps partially to blame, in that it resists the long-term development of performance pedagogies, repertoire and critical discourse necessary for the legitimisation of a performance community within the wider NIME community. It is noteworthy that NIME’s self-proclaimed continual quest for novelty aligns with larger institution prioritises that privilege innovation and impact over actual content and substance.

Finally, if the musics produced by and through the innovations of our NIME community are to have wider artistic legitimacy, we must actively expand our genealogy beyond the canon of the European and American avant-garde. As Green (2015) has well argued, NIME could facilitate a move towards “a pluralist aesthetic of electronic musicking” through more formal reflection on, and “sharing of,” the diverse musical practices that inform and motivate our research.

Expert Commentary: NIME—A Community of Communities

Michael J. Lyons

I am not sure when I first heard the phrase ‘the NIME community’. The current community mailing list,⁴ named in 2007, might suggest NIME has consciously considered itself as a community for nearly a decade. However, I have the impression that only in recent years has NIME been frequently described as a community, both verbally and in articles published at the conference.

The current article, the most recent in this collection, was selected because it is the first to explicitly attempt to analyze aspects of the NIME community. The authors base their approach on the theoretical frameworks of ‘situated learning’(SL) and ‘communities of practice’(CoP), which have long enjoyed broad influence in fields related to the sociology of learning, knowledge, and innovation. It is helpful to read this article in conjunction with key articles on SL and CoPs, and I can particularly recommend the lucid and insightful work of Brown and Duguid (Brown et al. 1989; Brown and Duguid 1991).

The article is therefore not really a survey of the NIME community, as the title might lead one to think, but an investigation of the NIME community from the viewpoint of a specific theoretical framework. Nonetheless, this offers readers with some experience at NIME a valuable opportunity to reflect on the social processes at work in the community from a perspective they might not normally adopt.

To shorten the story, based on a taxonomy from the CoP literature, the authors conclude that the NIME community is not itself a CoP—it is too heterogeneous in approach. Rather, NIME more closely resembles a ‘community of interest’(CoI), in that it aims broadly to “develop a body of work related to new digital instruments from different disciplines and perspectives.” Admirably, the authors do not attempt to force-fit NIME into the CoP framework, writing instead that:

Practitioners from different domains—HCI, computer science, electrical engineering, (computer) music, and arts—engage in a joint enterprise. Perhaps NIME could appropriately be described as a ‘community-of-communities.’

This corresponds closely with my view: multi-disciplinarity was an important aspect of the NIME workshop proposal (Poupyrev et al. 2001b) and has continued as an outstanding feature of the conference (Lyons and Fels 2015), which remains unusually open, for an academically oriented conference, to a plurality of approaches, tastes, and levels of expertise in both music and technology.

The authors locate bona-fide CoPs in several sub-communities affiliated with NIME. Their treatment is valuable and should serve as a basis for interesting further work, but this also falls short of being a survey: there are many such specialized groups, these have often evolved quite rapidly, sometimes spawning independent events. Moreover, this fragmented approach does not really shed much light on the community as a whole, and this leads me to ask: what other approaches could provide insight into the NIME community?

Besides a theoretical critique, it would be revealing to attempt empirical work. Scientometric analyses of the NIME published proceedings, such as Jensenius’ analysis (Jensenius 2014) of gesture-related terminology, can also provide insight into aspects of the community. On a larger scale, Liu and co-workers (Liu et al. 2014) presented a detailed, fascinating empirically-based account of the CHI research community using co-word analysis. This not only maps the network of research interests of the community, but highlights the connectivity of interests and how these have changed over time. It should be possible to conduct a similar analysis of the NIME archive and this would serve to map and track the evolution of the activities and interests of the community.

Scientometrics does not directly address every sociological question and other complementary approaches, such as ethnography should also be valuable. Rigorous ethnographic studies, however, such as underlie CoP theory itself, demand a significant long-term commitment of resources and effort and may well face special challenges in the context of the shape-shifting field of new music technology. More closely knit sub-CoPs, such as the examples given in the current article, should be more amenable to ethnographic work, but we should take care that a reductionist approach does not lead us to ignore the ecology of the larger community.

A more modest proposal, for starters, is to survey NIMErs themselves about their experience of the community in which they participate, via interviews, questionnaires, and/or free reflection. This could leverage existing resources such as the conference mailing list, web portal, and other existing channels. Designed intelligently and positively, this would serve as a participatory, awareness-raising, and constructive community-building activity.