Whether you are building new instruments, experimenting with generative tools, or simply curious about the intersection of play and musical AI, we would love to have you involved.
The workshop aims to:
Ground discussions of playfulness in concrete musical practice through the analysis of specific interaction moments drawn from participants’ work
Articulate a shared vocabulary for recurring experiential qualities and interaction structures associated with playfulness in music-making.
Examine how different distributions of agency and autonomy between human and DMI (e.g., generative systems, interactive machine learning, mixed-initiative interaction) affect forms of playfulness
• Explore how playful interaction functions across different expertise levels and musical communities, including its potential to lower and raise barriers to participation
• Derive design implications and research questions for developing playful AI music systems within and beyond the NIME community
We welcome participants from a wide range of backgrounds, including digital musical instrument designers, HCI researchers, music technologists, creative coders, composers, performers, and anyone with an interest in playful music interaction. You do not need to be an AI expert to participate.
We particularly encourage applications from people who represent diverse musical communities, career stages, and cultural contexts.
If you have an existing playful AI music system or a broader playful digital music project, we invite you to bring it to the workshop. This could be a live system, a prototype, a web-based tool, or any technology-mediated music practice. If you cannot bring a physical instrument to the venue, a short slide presentation or video demonstration works just as well. The focus should be on the character of the playful interaction, not the technical details.
A small number of participants will be selected to give a focused five-minute presentation at the start of the workshop, helping to ground the group's discussions in concrete cases. If your work is closely aligned with playful AI music interaction, you may be considered for this role. Selected demonstrators may present via live demo, slides, video, or a combination.
No existing project? No problem. If you are interested in the workshop themes but do not yet have something to demonstrate, you are equally welcome to apply. We will send you a lightweight speculative design template before the event, through which you can develop a short concept proposal to share with the group. This pathway is open subject to capacity.
Participants will be invited to contribute to a jointly authored paper developing a shared vocabulary framework for playfulness in AI-mediated music interaction. The Miro board produced during the workshop will serve as the shared foundation for this writing process.