Alon Ilsar on NIME or Mime - A Controversial Approach to Developing a New Instrument for Musical Expression
For those uninitiated to the New Instrument for Musical Expression (NIME) community, arguably the biggest yearly gathering of digital musical instrument designers, performers and researchers is the NIME Conference, this year in ‘Birmingham, UK’ in July. With the conference still going ahead online, most significantly it’s yearly concert series where audiences can truly experience the new sights and sounds of innovative instruments, how does one go about performing work that in its core is all about celebrating the concert hall? The ‘realness’ of live performance, the acoustics of the room, the social gathering, the relationships between people, music, movement, lights and experiences.
To take a step back, in this talk I will discuss my desire as a drummer, a composer, an improviser and a performer to surround myself with artists passionate about collaborating on real-time audio-visual gestural performances. I will hone on some approaches that one collaborator, visual artist Matt Hughes, and I took in the creation of a piece ‘One Five Nine,’ to be ‘performed’ at NIME this year, particularly on the role ‘miming’ has played. Touching on our paper that we will also present at this year’s NIME, I argue that this use of mime when designing Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) can help overcome choice paralysis, break from established habits, and liberate creators to realise more meaningful parameter mappings. Bringing this process into an interactive performance environment acknowledges the audience as stakeholders in the design of these instruments, and also leads us to reflect upon the beliefs and assumptions made by an audience when engaging with the performance of such ‘magical’ devices.
To finish off and bring the discussion back to the current disastrous state for live performers, I will return to reconciling approaches to present our work online and what role AR may play in this new world of Zoom performances
Alon is researching the uses of the AirSticks in the field of health and well being, making music creation more accessible to the broader community.
Alon holds a PhD in instrument design through the University of Technology Sydney, under the supervision of Andrew Johnston. He has played the AirSticks at Sydney’s Vivid Festival, on Triple J’s Like a Version and at NYC’s MET Museum, in projects including Trigger Happy ‘Visualised’, The Hour, The Sticks, Tuka (from Thundamentals), Sandy Evans’ ‘Rockpool,’ Ellen Kirkwood’s ‘[A]part‘, Kirin J Callinan, Kind of Silence (UK), Cephalon (US) and Silent Spring. He has played drums in Belvoir Theatre’s ‘Keating! the Musical,’ Sydney Theatre Company’s ‘Mojo,’ Meow Meow with the London Philharmonic, Bergen Philharmonic and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, Alan Cumming, Jake Shears and Eddie Perfect.
Through our research we explore the creative possibilities of technology–how it changes us and how we can harness it. Our work is not limited by discipline, approach or material. We undertake each inquiry with curiosity and openness, following our instincts in the search for innovative applications and undiscovered capabilities.
SensiLab is located at Monash University Caulfield, Australia.