Editors' Notes

For the past 20 years, the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference (NIME) has served as a hub for musicians and researchers from all over the world to share their late-breaking work on new musical interface design, and to collectively think about the future of this field.The 2020 edition of the NIME conference took place at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and focused on the theme of Accessibility of Musical Expression.” Many of the conference contributions addressed challenges of making musical expression more accessible,” especially in the context of designing with and for people who have diverse cognitive and physical needs. A plethora of papers addressed musician-centered interaction design, as well as new designs of interfaces for music education and other creative explorations.Although this special issue of CMJ is not necessarily focused solely on writings around the conference theme, the editors wish to briefly highlight the theme's importance and specific significance during the ongoing global pandemic, as COVID-19 drastically altered NIME's presentation format and raised extra debates with a view to accessibility and inclusion.This is also relevant because the pandemic seemed to have served as an urgent reminder to the NIME community as to their accountability of the needs of society in its full diversity and breadth. The necessity to change NIME to an entirely virtual event, caused by the pandemic, allowed the NIME community to explore diverse online technologies, while fashioning an exciting and much needed debate on how we engage and interact online, specifically through socially cohesive musicking” activities.The global pandemic was (and still is) an extraordinary situation that has impacted every one of us, reorganizing ourselves and society as a whole through physical separation. And while such distancing has moved not only conferences into virtual rooms (but also us as individuals), one could argue that the pandemic has, on the other hand, rekindled a highly collaborative, communal, and creative spirit, reigniting distributed and telematic music-making practices that had mostly been taking place in academic institutions up to the start of the pandemic in March 2020.COVID-19 stimulated many distributed and new creative actions, also among people who, before the pandemic, might never have come together for creative endeavors (leading to novel artistic events that flourished through popular hashtags such as #coronasongs, #pandemix, #covidance, #quarantunes, and #songsofcomfort).At the same time, essential questions about accessibility and inclusion also emerged. The issue of how access is gained, and who is included or excluded from the use of technological tools—a debate brought into sharp focus as a result of the pandemic—was indeed a much-discussed topic throughout NIME 2020.The issue of access, diversity, and inclusion, addressed in a few of the papers selected for this issue, needs to be set into a wider context of an increased availability of technological tools that have enabled many to make and produce music. However, despite much recent research around access barriers and how these might be overcome through the use of accessible music technology (AMT), supported by a growing interest in accessible digital musical instrument (ADMI) research (for an excellent overview, see Frid 2019), too many people still face disabling barriers.We know that some of the most well-designed devices are made in highly custom ways for the needs of a particular person with specific social, technical, and environmental factors taken into consideration. For a disabled musician, a successful, bespoke design needs to allow the person herself to be at the center of the design and decision-making process, but it is still often the case that bespoke AMTs do not see sustained use (Samuels 2016), and longevity of devices has been identified as problematic for new digital musical instruments (Morreale and McPherson 2017) and assistive technologies.The article by Lucas and colleagues included in this special issue gives an extensive overview of how bespoke AMTs are vital in enabling disabled artists to gain access to musicking,” owing to the unique way in which disability can present itself to each individual. Based on the experience garnered through a longitudinal ethnographic study, Lucas and coworkers reflect on the practice of designing and fabricating bespoke, accessible music technologies. The article highlights the fact that those involved in the design, fabrication, and use of such instruments could benefit from a concerted effort to share resources, knowledge, and skill as a mobilized community of practitioners.Indeed, in 2020 the NIME community seemed to mobilize specifically around the theme of disability, access, and inclusion, a topic that flared up immensely during the pandemic and was one of the threads throughout NIME 2020.The article by Lauren Hayes and Adnan Marquez-Borbon included here also connects to the discussion on inclusion and diversity. It goes even deeper as it examines some of the burgeoning concerns that have been raised within the NIME community for some time, including issues of the diversity of the NIME community itself, but also how, through rigorous” interdisciplinary research, the identity of the NIME community might or should be expanded. The authors emphasize NIME's potential to transform into a more diverse forum for multidisciplinary research into human–computer interaction (HCI), interface design, and electronic and computer music. They also remind us that the NIME Steering Committee announced a new conference Diversity Statement and Code of Conduct in 2018, whose aims are to foster an inclusive environment inviting participation from people of all ethnicities, genders, ages, abilities, religions, and sexual orientations.” And while the NIME community is generally aware of its issues related to representation and diversity, the authors bring our attention to the necessity of critically examining how the institutional structures that support NIME research help to sustain and reproduce limiting dominant narratives, and where they might instead be transformational.” In questioning the normalization of NIME” as a noun, the authors trace, and draw out, meanings of each letter of the NIME acronym, not only querying its newness” or the musical,” but also pointing to a readiness of the NIME community to address the wider sociopolitical concerns associated with the field. Drawing on earlier writings and critiques including that by Green (2014), Hayes and Marquez-Borbon urge the reader to focus on questions of musicality (rather than on purely technical concerns) and they stress (following Dahl, 2016) the importance of practice-based research in designing and conceptualizing new interfaces for musical expression.Their article, based on their paper that won the Best Paper award of NIME 2020, challenges the NIME community to take affirmative action and to work “towards a collective understanding of the research endeavour, rather than a competitive one where researchers themselves are commodities” (Green 2016, p. 79) in order to address what they see as epistemological and sociocultural ruptures in the NIME community.Laddy Patricia Cadavid Hinojosa's article fits this special issue in terms of exploring alternative practices to interface design. Cadavid describes a tactile (indeed, textile) and tangible interface made out of knots and cotton or wool strings: a device of the ancient Inca empire and previous Andean societies, the khipu. She discusses how it might suggest alternative practices of tangible live coding, computer music, and data sonification. The khipu was known to process and transmit statistical and narrative information; and Cadavid details her journey and process of creating an electronic version, in which conductive rubber cords can be woven together to generate experimental sound. Cadavid's Electronic_Khipu_ is a NIME in a MIDI controller, inspired by the original, ancient device and ancestral practices.Similarly, Chantelle Ko and Lora Oehlberg's article presents TRAVIS II, an augmented acoustic violin. Touch sensors integrated in its 3-D printed fingerboard track left-hand finger gestures in real time. An interesting design feature of this instrument is that all electronics can be removed, maintaining the aesthetics of a traditional violin. Extensive technical and design details are provided, and the authors discuss two compositions (“Dream State” and “Kindred Dichotomy”) in which TRAVIS II was used.Giulio Moro and Andrew P. McPherson's article introduces a novel keyboard-based digital musical instrument that uses continuous readings of key position to control a nonlinear waveguide flute synthesizer. The system is based on a keyboard scanner using optical reflectance sensors to detect the vertical position of the key, allowing for a richer set of interaction gestures than a velocity-based keyboard can. The performances of this instrument are evaluated through a user study based on six keyboard players.The last article of this collection presents findings of a controlled experiment, involving electronic music novices and experts, designed to investigate audience experiences of the authors' levels of detail (LODs) for visual augmentations. Olivier Capra, Florent Berthaut, and Laurent Grisoni show the differing impacts of LOD on the experience and understanding for different audiences, and they propose a new role for onstage stage performances that could manipulate augmentations and LODs during performances, a role they refer to as the augmenter.” Such a proposal is made as to address some of the challenges of the mediation between musicians and audiences and to enhance performance experiences.We are delighted to present this special issue of CMJ with the theme of Accessibility of Musical Expression,” stemming from the NIME 2020 conference. We have selected six papers that appear here as extended and revised versions of the original conference contributions.—Franziska Schroeder and Romain Michon, Guest Editors