nime & chime 2024 🌷 | Courtney N. Reed

DMI time with NIME and CHIME!: At the end of this year I presented work around designing vocal wearables and encoding experiences of timbre at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference in Utrecht, NL and the Computer Human Interaction and Music nEtwork (CHIME) Annual Conference in Milton Keynes, UK. 🎶

Presenting our work on Body Lutherie at NIME (left) and celebrating successful organisation with Yichen Wang (right) and a thank you gift for the organisers - tulip bulbs!

body lutherie & nime

I had a huge role during NIME this September as Paper Chair with Astrid Bin. It was definitely one of the most intense conference attendances I’ve had so far but the organising team did an amazing job and it really opened my eyes to the amount of passion, labour, and dedication that go into conferences. Especially those like NIME, which manage all the proceedings publication too!

I also presented a paper co-authored with Rachel Freire on our Body Lutherie practices to design the Bones anti-corset for vocal performance. Just a snip from the abstract on our work:

Body Lutherie: Co-Designing a Wearable for Vocal Performance with a Changing Body

“…Proposing a practice of “Body Lutherie”, we explore how digital instrument designers can honour and work with living, dynamic bodies. Our design of a breath-based vocal wearable instrument incorporated uncontrollable aspects of a vocalist’s body (that’s me!) and its physical change over different timescales. We distinguish the body in the design process and acknowledge its agency in vocal instrument design. Reflection on our co-design process between vocal pedagogy and eTextile fashion perspectives demonstrates how Body Lutherie can generate empathy and understanding of the body as a collaborator in future instrument design and artistic practice.”

Some scenes of Utrecht by day and night.

enculturation & chime

In December, I also presented work around enculturation and value encording in Digital Musical Instrument (DMI) design at the CHIME Conference at the Open University in Milton Keynes. It was great to connect with my local UK instrument design network and make some new friends working in this space.

I presented a talk on Enculturation and Value Encoding in the Design of Vocal DMIs. Carrying this theme of value-encoding further in DMI design, my colleague Charis Saitis presented some ongoing work around designing for timbre and ethnography done at the Timbre Tools Hackathon. Also involved in this timbre work are Bleiz Macsen Del Sette, Jordan Shier, Haokun Tian, Shuoyang Zheng, Sophie Skach, Corey Ford, and myself: Ethnographic Exploration of Timbre in Hackathon Designs.

This is also related to a recent publication we had at the 2024 Audio Mostly Conference, Timbre Tools: Ethnographic Perspectives on Timbre and Sonic Cultures in Hackathon Designs.

Presenting at CHIME (top row) and doing some jamming during the Musically Embedded Machine Learning Workshop, organised by Chris Kiefer and Andrea Martelloni (bottom).

references

2024

Enculturation and Value Encoding in the Design of Vocal DMIs

Courtney N. Reed

In Proceedings of the CHIME Annual Conference 2024, Dec 2024

Abs Bib PDF

@inproceedings{Reed_CHIME24_VocalEnculturation,
  title = {{Enculturation and Value Encoding in the Design of Vocal DMIs}},
  author = {Reed, Courtney N.},
  year = {2024},
  month = dec,
  booktitle = {{Proceedings of the CHIME Annual Conference 2024}},
  address = {The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom},
  series = {CHIME '24},
  numpages = {1},
  url = {https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6227c31a43daf21135453605/t/6738d984449bce18fd86195d/1731778948801/11+Courtney+N.+Reed.pdf},
}

Ethnographic Exploration of Timbre in Hackathon Designs

Charalampos Saitis, Bleiz Macsen Del Sette, Jordan Shier, and 5 more authors

In Proceedings of the CHIME Annual Conference 2024, Dec 2024

Abs Bib PDF

This paper reports a summary account of the Timbre Tools Hackathon: a hackathon that invited audio developers and music technologists to consider and work with timbre through the design of tools that promote a timbre-first approach to digital instrument craft practice—timbre tools. Through ethnographic observation, we identified different approaches towards integrating timbre as an active part of creating tools and technologies in music. These strategies inform future work and the development of tools to assist awareness and exploration of timbre for instrument makers.
@inproceedings{Saitis_CHIME24_TimbreEthno, title = {{Ethnographic Exploration of Timbre in Hackathon Designs}}, author = {Saitis, Charalampos and Del Sette, Bleiz Macsen and Shier, Jordan and Tian, Haokun and Zheng, Shuoyang and Skach, Sophie and Reed, Courtney N. and Ford, Corey}, year = {2024}, month = dec, booktitle = {{Proceedings of the CHIME Annual Conference 2024}}, address = {The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom}, series = {CHIME '24}, numpages = {1}, url = {https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6227c31a43daf21135453605/t/6734b6d5b882961f8ec04316/1731507925478/6+Charalampos+Saitis+et+al.pdf}, }
Timbre Tools: Ethnographic Perspectives on Timbre and Sonic Cultures in Hackathon Designs

Charalampos Saitis, Bleiz Macsen Del Sette, Jordan Shier, and 5 more authors

In Proceedings of the 19th International Audio Mostly Conference: Explorations in Sonic Cultures, Sep 2024

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Timbre is a nuanced yet abstractly defined concept. Its inherently subjective qualities make it challenging to design and work with. In this paper, we propose to explore the conceptualisation and negotiation of timbre within the creative practice of timbre tool makers. To this end, we hosted a hackathon event and performed an ethnographic study to explore how participants engaged with the notion of timbre and how their conception of timbre was shaped through social interactions and technological encounters. We present individual descriptions of each team’s design process and reflect on our data to identify commonalities in the ways that timbre is understood and informed by sound technologies and their surrounding sonic cultures, e.g., by relating concepts of timbre to metaphors. We further current understanding by offering novel interdisciplinary and multimodal insights into understandings of timbre.
@inproceedings{Saitis_AM24_TimbreTools, author = {Saitis, Charalampos and Del Sette, Bleiz Macsen and Shier, Jordan and Tian, Haokun and Zheng, Shuoyang and Skach, Sophie and Reed, Courtney N. and Ford, Corey}, title = {{Timbre Tools: Ethnographic Perspectives on Timbre and Sonic Cultures in Hackathon Designs}}, year = {2024}, month = sep, isbn = {9798400709685}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3678299.3678322}, doi = {10.1145/3678299.3678322}, booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 19th International Audio Mostly Conference: Explorations in Sonic Cultures}}, pages = {229–244}, numpages = {16}, location = {Milan, Italy}, series = {AM '24}, }
Body Lutherie: Co-Designing a Wearable for Vocal Performance with a Changing Body

Rachel Freire, and Courtney N. Reed

In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Sep 2024

Abs Bib PDF

Research at NIME has incorporated embodied perspectives from design and HCI communities to explore how instruments and performers shape each other in interaction. Material perspectives also reveal other more-than-human factors’ influence on musical interaction. We propose an additional, currently unaddressed perspective in instrument design: the influence of the body not only the locus of experience, but as a physical, entangled aspect in the more-thanhuman musicking. Proposing a practice of “Body Lutherie”, we explore how digital instrument designers can honour and work with living, dynamic bodies. Our design of a breathbased vocal wearable instrument incorporated uncontrollable aspects of a vocalist’s body and its physical change over different timescales. We distinguish the body in the design process and acknowledge its agency in vocal instrument design. Reflection on our co-design process between vocal pedagogy and eTextile fashion perspectives demonstrates how Body Lutherie can generate empathy and understanding of the body as a collaborator in future instrument design and artistic practice.
@inproceedings{Freire_NIME24_BodyLutherie, title = {{Body Lutherie: Co-Designing a Wearable for Vocal Performance with a Changing Body}}, author = {Freire, Rachel and Reed, Courtney N.}, year = {2024}, month = sep, booktitle = {{Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression}}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, numpages = {10}, pages = {117--126}, issn = {2220-4806}, url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2024/nime2024_18.pdf}, doi = {10.5281/zenodo.13904800}, editor = {Bin, S M Astrid and Reed, Courtney N.}, }