New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME): Creating and Composing Unique Interactive Performances
In this course, students will learn how to create a New Interface for Musical Expression, or NIME. They will understand how to effectively map sensory data onto custom interfaces designed to generate sound as an expressive musical instrument. Using a strong, hands-on approach, students will learn about electronic music composition, sound design, synthesis, effects processing, musical form, structure, development, and nonstandard notational principles. The course will culminate in an end-of-semester concert where students will perform original works, complete with NIME-specific notation, composed to showcase their NIMEs.
Our course will draw from the disciplines of electronics, computer programming, sound design, hardware design and fabrication, and electronic music composition and notation. Generally speaking, these disciplines fall into three categories: Hardware and software; music/sound creation/composition and notation; and, design.
Hardware and software will be emphasized to give students the foundation required to map human gestures and the environment to sound. Electronic music composition and notation will be taught so that the resulting interfaces are dynamic and sophisticated enough to be capable of expressive and repeatable performances. And, design will be the link between the technical computer skills and the more creatively focused theory of electronic music composition. The amalgam of these disciplines is a New Interface for Musical Expression, or NIME.
Our course will follow much of the same ideas covered in similar courses at Stanford, Princeton, and NYU. The semester will culminate in a performance of students’ NIMEs, complete with score and documentation, at The Hartt School.
This course will integrate perspectives from technical, creative, and hybrid standpoints, focusing them on a single task: the creation of a new and expressive musical interface. This requires students to maintain an active mindset in each discipline. For example, creating an expressive musical gesture from a digital interface will not work if the technical and design components are not adequately addressed. Similarly, if only technical issues are considered in the design process, the interface is likely to be neither expressive nor useful.
This class is not just focused on conceptual knowledge and theory — it is centered around the actual creation of a NIME. Each student will be learning through and from real-world application of these disciplines.
Although the course will impart technical skills, the real goal is for students to reflect on their own experiences of musical performance — and on art in general — to decide what is missing and how to fill that gap. NIME as a field, in addition to being a noun, exists on the boundary between technology, art, and culture. This course will not only throw into question students’ taste and values about electronic music, it will also force them to question what constitutes an expressive performance at all.
We will employ Harvard’s “group work” and “collaborative note-taking” active learning concepts to teach students how to build circuits, solder electronic components, and test sensors. For group work, we will pair a student who identifies as a musician with one who identifies as an engineer. In this manner, musicians will help engineers with musical concepts, and engineers will help musicians with engineering concepts.
For collaborative note-taking, students will be given time to review each other’s notes for mistakes. At the end of class, students will consolidate their individual notes into a “master” note sheet that may be used by both students. (Cornell’s active learning methodologies include a similar concept called “catch-up”.)
We will carry out the aforementioned by oscillating between lecture and activity at a ratio of 3:1 or 2:1, depending on the material. For example, for every 12 minutes of lecture we’ll break for 4 minutes of activities. Or, for every 20 minutes of lecture we’ll break for 10 minutes of activities. Each class will begin with a session breakdown and end with a summary.
Because of the amount of material we need to cover, we estimate that an active learning model will be observed for 40–50% of the semester.