I am Enrique Tomás of the Tangible Music Lab of the University of Art and Design Linz in Austria
I am presenting now the paper "A Playful Approach to Teaching NIME":
Pedagogical Methods from a Practice-Based Perspective
So in this paper I am presenting five years of teaching NIME at a Media Arts program of an art university
I will also share my practice based methods, class exercises I developed during these years
and I will also present the results of this teaching or training experience
In 2013 I was asked to create
a new course on new interfaces for musical expression
at the University of Arts in Linz
in the Media Arts program called Interface Culture
So in the art academies, usually we have a few typical
problems or issues of teaching
technological courses, on the one hand
students' profile could be quiet miscellaneous, so we have to adapt the class to all these profiles
and make it interesting for all of them
On the other hand, there are many imported
idiosyncratic teaching and training methods. So in every department, in every faculty they have their own
traditional methods for teaching
It is also interesting to remark
that most of us never attended a NIME course in our universities because they didn't exist
so when you, or one approaches the
possibility of teaching NIME then one has to decide which methods imported from other
courses or disciplines may use
So the context of this course was the following:
on the one hand students had to learn how to design and build NIMEs,
on the other hand I had to
improve their performative skills and also students had to produce and perform music
The class is usually attended by 15 to 20 students per semester
So I had around 95 students in total during these five years
60% of the students are female
The expertise or the background of the students is that well, they come from different backgrounds
they usually have experience in various disciplines
but not really in music. Only 24% of these students had a background in music
But most of them, because they wanted to apply to these Media Arts Master,
they have some experience or background in electronics and programming
So as a teacher I had a personal objective:
it was presenting our discipline, NIME, not as an external subject, something like a
syllabus of contents and techniques and tricks to study,
but as a subject students have to embody through some practice-based exploration
For this I decided to integrate practice-based methods
Practice-based methods are activities undertaken in order to gain new knowledge
partly by means of practice and the outcomes of that practice
Well, what does this really mean in my course?
So I thought that it was going to be really difficult
to make these students understand the difficulties of creating musical interfaces
if they were not practicing and they were not really embodying the difficulties and issues of the discipline
so for example how can they design meaningful embodied interactions
if they never had to perform those interactions?
So in fact many decisions taken in our instruments
are decisions taken during
the moment of interaction
it's not this moment of the concert that we only call it practice but is mostly
the moments of preparation, the moments of rehearsal, the moment of testing all the
electronics and software that conform the instrument
The second ingredient in the recipe of my course was playfulness
as Maria Lugones defined that, it is a kind of openness to behave like a fool,
like a combination of not worrying too much about what we are doing when we are doing something
I thought that this ideology of doing would be probably interesting for the students
They usually bring a lot of respect to technology, to the act of being on stage,
presenting your art in front of others, so I thought that maybe
including some "grams" of playfulness
in the course would be positive for them
The course was actually
structured through some weekly
performative assignments that the students have to present
So these are always some practice-based activities that the students have to co-create with others
So usually I give them a well-briefed artistic concept
involving some reflection on some technology and then they have one week
to co-create with others to think and tinker
solutions for that specific challenge
So the first assignment that I usually formulate in the first class is this one that I called "re-thinking embodiment"
I introduce them to the MobMuPlat
application for iPhone or for Android and then they install it
Basically this application is able to run Pure Data patches and then sonify the
information coming from sensors or touch activity
So I leave them exploring the application and
playing some music with that and then I ask them to reflect on the relations created between the
application and themselves and the smartphone: what they are doing,
what the interface is attracting them to do etc. etc.
and finally, I ask them to playfully rethink their
embodied relation with the application
Touching the capacitive touch screen
of the smartphone is not anymore allowed
and they have find new embodied relationships with the instrument
This is an example of what happened in one case
The second assignment is called "Play Incessantly" and is inspired by this article by Alvin Lucier
Origins of a Form: Acoustical Exploration, Science and Incessancy, where Lucier describes how
incessancy was a method for structuring
performances of the Sonic Arts Union
This is the assignment: pick an object or a material which can produce sound when it is touched or
activated then do something playful and incessant with this object
Choose a basic action and repeat it incessantly
Something very simple, but you have to repeat it and repeat it
Finally, you don't have to stop the action until something unexpected occurs
The third assignment that I'm introducing in the course
is the unplugged interface orchestra. Usually students have a lot of concern
with technology, so I had the idea of
helping them to explore or design before any technological constraint
with this project or assignment inspired by this
funny situation of the band Justice when they were
caught playing the interface without any USB connected so they were called unplug
So then this is the assignment: envision a cool and novel NIME
It doesn't matter if you don't know how to build it then make a model in real scale and use for that cheap materials
fix the gesture to sound mapping and your voice is the synthesizer
and finally explore it musically
Here on the right we see some examples
of some models created by the students
and it is really interesting because students envision
interfaces without thinking on the limitations of technologies,
but this is also quite interesting because students reveal
where their interests are in the field of NIME
Finally students are asked to
Fulfil this fourth challenge, which is the computer mouse talents
This is a complete cycle of
the so-called design thinking loop
in which students have to solve a challenge in a collaborative way
so in this case creating
an interface for a group of mice or for a mouse
The final concert is actually also considered an assignment
in this class but it takes two months to prepare this concert and create and build
the interfaces for it
So here I am presenting some examples of works students created in the last years
Every year we change the venue where students play and they are confronted with a public audience
from the city of Linz
The aesthetic approaches as you see are quite various and miscellaneous
But in other cases the interfaces created are really idiosyncratic
So in general students without any
background in interface design for music
they didn't become virtuosos but they became quite
artistically competent for performing on stage and then actually that was the good news from this method
So their performative skills were progressively
incorporated with the assignments and I think that was the really positive news of this course
Their design skills, it was tough to design with them, they are not really
used to design for stability, for robustness
In terms of technical skills
they managed to play and to finish their instruments
but I think that this course is really too short for students to understand the
technical alternatives in the world of NIME
So in terms of the musical interfaces produced
95 students
created 95 different NIMEs although
different patterns of creation were observed in terms of gestural interaction, etc, etc
90% of the instruments were highly gestural so they really wanted to experiment with gestures
and experimentation was preferred to stability or something more
connected to what a controller is or a commercial controller is
Second, in terms of musical results students preferred organising sound more than composing music
and third, in relation to the practice methods
I developed with the students
I have to say that as a teacher it took me three years to find the adequate combination of exercises and contents
it was not just that I did assign these exercises in the first year, but it was a kind of
work in progress, testing my results
and actually I think that this exercise at the end motivated at the same level both the students and
myself the teacher to attend the class
so I think that in the case of our university
Smart Academy's practice based methods can help students deal with subjects related to technology
So these are my final conclusions
Students gave me the feedback that they finally understood many things that
they learned in other courses of physical computing and music computing and music programming with this course
Also that for them NIME became a medium and not a subject to learn
so they are now motivated to include interfaces for musical expression
in all the disciplines, in sculpture, in conceptual art, etc. etc.
And finally, in relation to playfulness, I think that this
ideology of doing that I called playfulness fostered performativity, freedom in the class
creative thinking and also gave impulse to alternative approaches to embodiment with technology,
it relaxed a lot our relationship with the limitations and constraints of
dealing with technology and at the end I think it was also a positive
ingredient to include in my course. Thank you very much