Prehistoric NIME: Revisiting Research on New Musical Interfaces in the Computer Music Community before NIME

The history of the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference starts with the first workshop on NIME during the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in 2001. But research on musical interfaces has a rich "prehistoric" phase with a substantial amount of relevant research material published before 2001. This paper highlights the variety and importance of musical interface-related research between the mid-1970s and 2000 published in two major computer music research venues: the International Computer Music Conference and the Computer Music Journal. It discusses some early examples of research on musical interfaces published in these venues, then reviews five other sources of related literature that pre-date the original NIME CHI workshop. It then presents a series of implications of this research and introduces a collaborative website that compiles many of these references in one place. This work is meant as a step into a more inclusive approach to interface design by facilitating the integration of as many relevant references as possible into future NIME research.