Good morning everyone I'm Fabio Morreale, I'm a lecturer at the University of Auckland
in New Zealand at the School of Music and I co-authored this work with
all these amazing people - Astrid Bin, Andrew McPherson, Paul Stapleton,
and, dulcis in fundo, Marcelo Wanderley. Our paper is a proposal to develop an
outward-looking political agenda for our community. In the last few years our
community has been increasingly interested in social and political
issues and especially gender diversity and inclusion. Gender diversity has been
discussed by several papers workshops and also a specific Award has being
established in 2018 if I'm not wrong the Pamela-Z Award. But also inclusion,
accessible musical instruments is one of the themes at NIME 2020. Both these
issues have been acknowledged in the NIME official diversity statement that I
just posted there. The emergence of these themes indicate that the NIME
community's attention is widening to include social political issues however
these issues we argue are mostly situated within the community so we have
so far neglected really to engage in critical work with the world that is
outside NIME. In our article we propose a shift in NIME's focus from
inward-looking kind of self reflections to the outside to outward-facing
politically engaged critique specifically we propose to expand our
discussions to engage with the political issues that are inherent in new musical
instruments and not just our own - yes our own - but not just our own but also those
made by others. In the paper we listed a few of these political issues but I am
just quickly skimming through a few of them. First of all the environmental costs
they're not just about the production distribution and disposal of instruments
but also the runtime costs for instance the machine learning powered resource-intensive
instruments or labour exploitation the working conditions in
the factories that manufacture the cheap sensors that we use and are used
by others in digital musical instruments. In our paper we do two
things more or less first of all we invite NIME researchers to analyse
political issues but also we dig deeper in one specific issue that we believe is
probably the most pressing one that is the democratization of music making that
is defined as affordable sophisticated and cost-effective technologies enabling
known experts to engage in music making. As all of you probably know every
year dozens of new instruments specifically targeting non musicians are
funded via crowdfunding campaigns and these campaigns often promise a new
instrument that anybody can play and I have a few examples here, I think there are more
in the paper. But basically "No experience need anyone can just pick it
up and play" the idea of an easy-to-play musical instruments for
everybody is not new and also don't get me wrong
fostering interest in learning music is absolutely a noble goal however these
instruments and the way in which they're marketed portray no musicians as
frustrated individuals that have always wanted to make musics but just
instruments are just inefficient too difficult take too long to master this
view clearly disregards some deeper political social and cultural reasons
that a person might want to engage music but he's unable to she's unable to like
socioeconomic resources, the undervaluing of the Arts in schools, the time poverty
that is imposed by the socioeconomical background an exclusion due to
gender and disability. Possibly even more important is the focus on
efficiency so the lack of musical abilities framed as a technical issue
that must be addressed with technology and this is a typical problem that Morozov
and others named techno-solutionism, that is the blind attempt to see
technology as basically the answer to all problems and then presume rather
than investigate the problems that is trying to solve. In this perspective
easiness becomes the central concern when measuring the quality of an
instrument for novices however when you sacrifice complexity
to achieve easiness well the perfect musical instrument can only be
an oversimplification of music making and it is not clear is not proven it's
not studied whether an oversimplified version of an instrument or an
oversimplified instrument actually holds any benefits for a novice or for
an expert musician especially in the long terms. This problematising of music
learning along with this disregard for the more subtle and really harder-to-address
problems of political nature means that its narrative argues for
technological inevitability, that is the belief that making things easier or
more efficient with the technology is always appropriate always positive
always something to be sought after. I want just start with this
starting point, a starting point because that's what this paper is we are opening
doors to discussion we are not offering solutions. Where should we start
from? In the paper is more extensively explained but I have a few
things that I want to talk about now though. First of all scrutinise new
commercial instruments. We should be responsible for identifying their
socio-cultural ideological implications and in the paper actually we also
explain why we think that the NIME community is the best place for the
expertise that we have and for the diversity that we have to start to kick
off these sort of discussions so really we suggest that NIME researchers should
engage in empirical ethnographic qualitative quantitative any sort of..
performative investigations of these new instruments and understand - how do
they work? Are they delivering what is promised? Because probably some of them
actually are working great. Then second thing: contrast the logic of efficiency
and again Morozov here suggests that if we subject creative activities to the
logic of efficiency it's like depriving humans of the ability to achieve mastery
with this ability. Third Point we should avoid
techno-solutionism and techno-inevitability we should take instead a
critical stance on technological innovation for its own stake... sake and
reflect we should really reflect about these avoidance of techno-solutionism
in the instruments we make but also in the research that we promote
Fourth thing, the last one, we spent quite some space we dedicated some space
in the paper: rethink NIME submission so it's quite a more practical one but if
we wanted to include this sort of exploration in NIME then we need to
reconsider the correct format of the submissions and we have a few practical
suggestions again. First of all publishing doesn't have to
be on an annual basis but maybe on a rolling basis second thing: review page
limit and exclude* references from page count that's because you know if this
can encourage widest scope and more rigorous explorations. If you want to
unpack deeply political positions you need interdisciplinary theories and
epistemologies and methods and you probably need several pages for
references especially because they might be relatively new to
community and adding these number of references can also work for the
community to expand our discourse and to introduce new connections to works that
are in other domains. Third very importantly: review what we mean with
novelty. The review process seems to prioritize a little bit technical
novelty and this might be the reason that leads to this ever-increasing
number of ephemeral instruments and discouraging instead some more
analytical work about existing instruments in the end the pursuit of
novelty has environmental and ideological implications and we should
ask if you're not bound by capitalist ideology why do we as a community have
such an enduring focus on novelty? I want to say it clearly again this work
is not.. it's a starting point, it's not intended to impose limitations or
boundaries within the community but really we want to rise some ontological
questions about NIME about who we are and who we want to be
so are we developers and keepers of scientific knowledge? Are we an artist
collective that advance an aesthetic agenda or craftspeople that are handing down
techniques? But also has NIME matured enough to render political judgments on
instruments work outside of community? We believe so and I think in the paper we
made it clear but it's not a rhetoric question. And how can we develop
political engagement and discourse around our own work and can we afford
not to do so? To conclude we really need explicit positions on political issues
that are connected to new musical instruments and many of these political
issues we acknowledge that are pretty much latent but if we fail at this we
risk an implicit agreement with the status quo
and I just leave this quote from Shoshana Zuboff while I think I'll take questions...