NIME is on your side

Oslo is probably heaving a sigh of relief after last week's NIME madness.  Hordes of programmers, designers, musicians and techies of all stripes descended on the city, brandishing Apple products, to converse enthusiastically about their favourite force-sensitive resistors, among other topics.  For a musician/philosopher such as myself, the prospect of conversing with such tech-savvy individuals (who, I reckoned, probably thought in labelled circuit diagrams) was intimidating to say the least, but I needn't have worried.  A friendlier bunch I could not have met.  Between playing with the new wacky instruments being demo-ed, trying out the latest open-source audio processing software and even running around a classroom pretending to be a sine oscillator (I'm not even joking), I had a whale of a time. 

It was truly inspiring to meet so many people from such a wide variety of disciplines who had all come together because of a shared passion for music.  One of the main emergent themes of discussion was that everyone, not just the privileged few, should be encouraged to express themselves creatively through music.  If we can get more people to overcome their inhibitions and try their hand at making music, in whatever rudimentary way, through designing apps for the iPad (like the Magic Fiddle) or interactive museum installations, then the interaction will be its own reward.  This, I thought, is what music is really about: self-expression, communication and above all, fun.

Not only that, but new interfaces for musical expression (as per the conference series title) open up a whole new world of sonic possibilities to the creative performers.  We are no longer limited to the native sounds of objects: we can map our actions to whatever musical parameters we want.  We can make sounds that nobody has ever made before, in completely novel and bespoke ways.  Not only that, but the hardware we need to design such instruments is for the most part very cheap, and there is an ever-growing number of open-source software applications being developed by magnanimous folk all over the world.  Of course, this open-endedness brings its own challenges - the removal of all constraints will result in paralysis until we decide which ones need to be reintroduced - but there is no doubt that it's an exciting time to be a musician.  Roll on NIME 2012.