I found the experience at NIME 2014 very richly rewarding. I am working in the area of music analysis and meta-creation specific to Hindustani music. In India, there is not much happening in this area as electronic music in the context of Indian arts is fairly unexplored. It was for this reason that going to NIME was especially exciting to me. I was able to see and interact with several sound installations, the most impressive ones being “Tipping Point” by Kathy Hinde. I was able to witness Laetitia Sonami’s performance with the Lady’s glove – an electronic instrument she has been perfecting for about 20 years now. The performance was incredible, and really showed me a way forward for electronic instruments to be used in performance settings and the aesthetics of that if it were applied to other musical stages and interaction profiles. I was able to attend an Algorave party also, which was rave compositions being livecoded. This was a first time experience of livecoding for me. There was an MIT press stall in the conference andI was also able to buy several books that would be helpful in further research in this area.

I was able to attend poster and demo sessions from a lot of artists. The most striking ideas were those about synthesizing texture, and working with sound corpus. I was able to interact with several researchers regarding my own paper presentation and their work. The 4Ms lab in Oslo, Norway; Goldsmiths’ EAVI group, MTG Barcelona and so on were some strong labs that came across in the conference. I will be looking at labs like this as future prospects after my masters is over, and I decide to apply for PhDs.

I have come back with several ideas about how to progress with this work of cross domain mappings for musical creation, using new interfaces with traditional playing styles, and also more techniques of computer music have become apparent to me. I want to thank the ACM-W scholarship awards deeply for making this experience possible for me.