Witch Army at New Interfaces for Musical Expression!

Extremely excited that we were selected to present a performance and paper on the NEW Roborecorder at NIME 2026 in London!

I will be performing Friday night 26th June at Rich Mix, details here. If you will be at the conference, please do join us and come and say hello!

If you won’t be at the conference, I will be live-blogging the conference here. I already have two amazing workshops lined up on the Tuesday and can’t wait to meet everyone in person!

TUESDAY 23rd JUNE

0700 leave the house dazed

0730 the trains are all down! woohoo! the heatwave’s not even started yet

0930 arrive at the workshop! Get AI text to audio running (ok this takes an HOUR) and start running some crazy prompts. Decide to generate some audio based on Spiral Dial Episode 2- see if the model beats our actual original jam session based on the same text!

1030 Well, it’s different! And shorter. But there’s still definitely a narrative in there. It’s actually produced some amazing textures. We use RAVE to produce some interpolated percussion samples. My partner adds on some cool ASMR textures using MALT.

1130 Try interpolating my own writing and Trump’s thoughts on Steve Reich. The model crashes. Can’t say I blame it.

1200 Everyone shares the results of their AI audio experiments. Including a crying jester! Pretty epic discussion and sounds.

1300 Have a great chat with Professor Landon Morrison from the University of Rochester about propaganda music and pick up some fab book recommendations

1330 Head up to lunch. Everyone else has already eaten all of the free lunch! Well, not free, but included… but I ran into Tom Mitchell my partner in crime on the latest roborecorder – and of MiMU gloves fame- together with one of his postdocs David. We hang around the lunch station. The only food left is gluten free and we’re not allowed to eat it because we’re not gluten free.

1340 They decide we are allowed to eat the gluten free food but there’s hardly any left so we forage at the cafeteria for poke bowls…

1350 Tom shares the UWE brochure with me, featuring my performance this Friday evening! Woohoo!

1405 Head up to Textile Testimonies, a really fascinating workshop exploring invisible labour through collective creation of and improvisation with fabric instruments. Respect to Dr Jocelyn Ho for dialling in and presenting from Sydney (!)

This is my creation, copper tape and blood, what’s not to like? We were then able to use crocodile clips to connect all of our creations to the instruments themselves and have a fabric jam before sharing thoughts on the division of domestic labour, gendered aspects of that and how that related to our own lives. We also shared suggestions for redressing the balance. I haven’t made anything with fabric since I was forced to do sewing lessons at school while the boys did football, so this actually felt surprisingly empowering!

1810 Head over to Hackney Bridge for the opening ceremony. There’s a seance happening at 1930 in Hackney Wick, not sure I will make it to this, but the outfits and instruments look pretty witchy.

Wednesday 24th June

2030 arrive after a long day working elsewhere to see the Improvisers Orchestra! Unfortunately I JUST miss their set but catch the amazing Steve Beresford for a quick catchup.

2100 head downstairs and catch an incredible live movement generated set with two musicians gyrating around the space. High prevalence of saw sounds- ominous!

2130 head back to the studio to scope out the space pre my show Friday. Run into the lovely Lia of catastrophone fame – check out our collab here https://liamice.bandcamp.com/track/anisocoria

lia has been organising a lot of the live events here- a LOT of work!

2145 anyone else cant resist a no entry sign?

2150 just kidding I was invited. Checking out the sound desk before my set Friday! Met the lovely Oscar and Maya at the controls.

2200 looking forward to tonight’s performances! Including the following amazing pieces. Earlier there was an audio device for sharpening pencils which sadly I missed but feel I am in need of!

up first is feedback sensibilities- basically a closed loop sax-speaker circuit! Eerie sounds and very cool.

next: parasitic! One of the most epic things I have seen. This robot needs its own movie! Particularly enjoyed the part where the robot literally knocked the performer’s glasses off

2230 finally, a musical game show where the audience pick sound to live code!

head back to the tube feeling happy and inspired

THURSDAY 25th June

1000 run through Witch Army, it seems everything working well for tomorrow’s set!

1200 head over to Loughborough Uni London for the afternoon sessions. Take a minor detour via Silvertown…oops!

1400 have a lovely chat with Molly Jones from the Uni of Michigan. She has a fab installation featuring wind triggered resonator!

1600 check out some paper presentations….including pencil sharpener music and algorithmic musical juggling. Honestly feel like sharpening a pencil into a guitar amp is MUCH preferable to plugging a guitar into it. Sounds better too!

1715 back of the bus…obv

1730 bagels with the Bristol crowd. This is becoming a habit! After a top class bagel from Beigel Bake at SXSW we decide to try the place next door on grounds that they have chairs. It’s a solid bagel. Meanwhile we discuss ways to implement live coding using only a flute.

1900 dinosaur choir! Courtney Brown has 3D printed a hadrosaur skull and made it into an instrument..sounds epic!

2000 tech failure/chat break. Discover NIME bingo!

how many did you spot today, im just waiting for the laser cut box and valence-arousal space!

2008 it’s working now…Daphne Oram’s samples triggered by an electromagnetic interface, seance style! Have to say that when the light came on and her voice came in it was enough to raise the dead

2020 next up – EMG MUSIC!

https://nime2026.org/proceedings/616.html

controlling the modular with only a clenched fist!

2040 next up a live coder and drummer exploring the ‘pyramid tala’

2055 Orrery Arcana: a live musical tarot jam! Very cool witchy vibe /light and capacitive sensors

https://nime2026.org/proceedings/562.html

2120 waiting for Evicshen by Victoria Shen- all the chairs get taken 🙁 to increase capacity

2130 wow, not seen anything like this before. Very engaging noise artist and some very clever instruments. Including a musical whip. Intention is to explore relationships of bodies to sound. For me some of the positions eg squatting on a table when controlling instruments were objectifying and while this is a totally valid statement within performance art context, within this male majority conference feel that a headline performance so focused on female physicality over musicality felt disappointing. The faces on a lot of men present reminded me of ‘sax face’ – slightly glazed appearance of men in the audience when I used to play sax in a rock band. For me this is not a vibe I like to be part of at a concert.

2230 headed home! Another thought provoking day. The ankle is beginning to struggle with heat/tube/standing.

FRIDAY 26th June

1200 pack up the studio quickly after having a lie in/resting the ankle. Think Dino has gig envy! Certainly dino worthy weather outside- no chance of freezing to death!

1420 Arrive sweating, dump the peli and dive straight into the posters and demos! Some wonderful objects here including these musical gait training objects you can strap to your shoes! It measures attack, pacing, angle etc and you can map parameters so that walking correctly makes a drum sound. So useful for my leg!

took some videos of some of these, which plan to post to insta at a later date!

and this amazing interactive canvas using capacitive sensors and a collaborative machine learning model transforming sounds as you touch! There is also a multi canvas model. Check out perceptrumduo on insta!

also: a flute where the keys are pressed for you by a robot…it only plays Moon River tho, so dont feel toooo redundant- YET!

finally a visual Kodaly pitch tracking software!

Before heading over to the keynote

1545 interesting tween talk convo on aesthetic considerations at NIME/balance between performance and technical practice. Definitely tilts much more towards the latter of WOMEX, Classical NEXT etc

1615 Plenary /town hall

“if you’re going to use a RAVE model in your performance, please at least make it sound good”

😂😂😂😂😂

in case anyone’s reading, no RAVE models in my performance tonight…you are safe! 😉

another suggestion that information on how to showcase/demo/poster at NIME would be useful for NIME newbies- totally agree with this!

someone also feeds back that there is no support structure for full attendance scholarships and as a result one maker could not be here. Cost is indeed a huge barrier to attending these meetings in general.

chair responds that most of the £450 fee went to paying for the Rich Mix venue, which is a charity, and that she also paid to attend out of her own pocket despite organising it unpaid. There is no money lying around. They are actively asking for suggestions for improvement for next year.

there is also a request for earplugs for tonight’s concert, after the levels last night…!

Ableton are sponsoring the conference- Laura from Ableton is here and gives a shout out for their new toys Rainbow and extensions sdk

Tom Mitchell my collaborator is announcing the paper of the year award…!