Anywhere and here: zcreative a toolkit for distributed control

Benedict Gaster; Nathan Renney

Anywhere and here: zcreative a toolkit for distributed control
Image credit: Benedict Gaster; Nathan Renney

Abstract:

This paper is about sound and by extension the design of musical instruments through the window of shared play, memory, place, and materiality. It looks at NIME design within the context of folktales and storytelling. Exploring the design of a distributed musical controller and its entangled use for performance and tabletop role-playing games that incorporate sound. What does it mean for a musical performance to be a community or a game to create a story on the one hand and be an instrument on the other?

We play with this question through the design of a new musical instrument toolkit, zcreative, which is a set of autonomously entangled controls, forming a network of concurrent controllers, that manipulate a whole.

zcreative is explored through three examples, considering what a NIME might be in an ever entangled web of interactions. FM for 8 phones is a multi-channel spatial sound peformance, where the listeners are also performers; radical interaction opens up a NIME themed podcast through community listening; and pebbles is a sound driven tabletop role-playing game, where sound is first class and forms an additional creative axis for story telling.