Trends at NIME -- Reflections on Editing "A NIME Reader"
This work provides a curated overview for researchers and practitioners in musical expression, but it is incremental as it compiles existing papers without new technical results.
The authors edited an anthology of papers from the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference, selecting works to represent its diverse artistic, scientific, and technological approaches over 15 years, and proposed activities to strengthen the field based on critical analysis of the community.
This paper provides an overview of the process of editing the forthcoming anthology "A NIME Reader - Fifteen Years of New Interfaces for Musical Expression." The selection process is presented, and we reflect on some of the trends we have observed in re-discovering the collection of more than 1200 NIME papers published throughout the 15-year long history of the conference. An anthology is necessarily selective, and ours is no exception. As we present in this paper, the aim has been to represent the wide range of artistic, scientific, and technological approaches that characterize the NIME conference. The anthology also includes critical discourse, and through acknowledgment of the strengths and weaknesses of the NIME community, we propose activities that could further diversify and strengthen the field.