What NIME talks about when it talks about touch
S. M. Astrid Bin; maj nikita doehring; Berit Greinke
- oral
- Paper PDF link
- Presence: in person
- Duration: 16
- Type: long
- Session: Theory in Practice
Abstract:
Touch is a key concept in music performance and interactive music practice, encompassing both physical interactions and metaphorical understandings. Within the NIME archive, however, touch remains largely untheorised as a concept, despite its centrality to computer-mediated musical practice. Although many works mention touch, the term carries multiple, often unexamined meanings. We ask, then: What does NIME talk about when it talks about touch?
We answered that question through a reflexive thematic analysis of the NIME archive with a semantic approach. We began by constructing a corpus from the NIME proceedings, coding the mentions of “touch” across 119 works, and iteratively sorting and organising these codes to construct themes. We constructed three major themes (Applied Technology and Design, Historical and Contextual, and Expanded Discussion), and found that operational descriptions dominate NIME’s touch discourse. This paper presents our methodology and results, and argues that without conceptual clarity on touch, important dimensions of musical expression and embodied interaction remain under-explored in NIME. We conclude by highlighting areas for inquiry that bridge music practice and technological design.