You're An Instrument!: Creating active music-making experiences through worldbuilding and storytelling

This paper outlines the development and use of NIME supporting active audience participation within You're an Instrument!, an immersive childrens' theatre show that turns a planted audience member into a musical instrument. We outline the use of wireless gestural instruments in the show, exploring their novel use as hidden props and theatrical devices that help invite audience members into a fictional world. Through the creation of this fictional world, we illustrate how Digital Musical Instruments can be employed to build a narrative that may help to actively involve audience members. This paper is a call for instrument designers to consider using worldbuilding and storytelling techniques to more actively engage audience members in discovering the workings of new instruments.