CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

NIME15 brings the combination of music, creativity and technology to the forefront to bring a distinctive, hands-on experience for exhibition goers in Baton Rouge.

The 15th annual New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference and exhibition features one-of-a-kind instruments and music-creation tools from around the world to the Shaw Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge. Straying away from the experience of traditional art exhibits, NIME encourages attendees to pick up the original creations and start interacting with them.

The NIME conference takes place in various big cities around the world, such as Seoul and London. Until now, the last time the conference was in America was in 2012 when it was held in Michigan. Baton Rouge had the honor of hosting the conference this year due to the high recognition LSU programs in this field have.

“We have a number of researchers and musicians that are well known all around the world,” said experimental music and digital media professor Jesse Allison . “We also have new facilities that are absolutely fantastic. As far as making the conference appealing to the international community it was a pretty easy sell,” 

What makes the program interesting is the variety of musical instruments as well as how they are thought up. For many of the artists, this is their medium of choice. Most of the artists have backgrounds in engineering as well as art and decide they want to create something no one has ever seen before, Allison said. This year in particular, LSU as host of the conference decided to focus on a more centralized theme for exhibited works.

“A lot of the works we ended up choosing were ones that dealt with the idea of humans interacting with computers in new and novel ways but also combine that with self expression and creativity,” said assistant professor at the school of art and the center for computation and technology Derick Ostrenko. “There are people that like to mix traditional art forms with new technology to create ‘installation art’ that focus on experience over something hung on a wall.”

NIME15 runs at the Shaw Center until June 28. Admission is free to everyone.