Z Creative, 2026
Zcreative is a project about sound and by extension the design of musical instruments through the window of shared play, memory, place, and materiality. It looks at NIME design within the context of storytelling. Exploring the design of a distributed musical controller and its use for performance and tabletop role-playing games that incorporate sound. What does it mean for a musical performance to be a community, or a game to create a story on the one hand and be an instrument on the other? We play with this question through the design of a new musical instrument toolkit, zcreative, which is a set of autonomously connected controls, forming a network of concurrent controllers, that manipulate a whole. zcreative is explored through three examples, considering what a NIME might be in a web of interactions. FM for 8 phones is a multi-channel spatial sound performance, where the listeners are also performers; radical interaction opens up a NIME themed podcast through community listening; and pebble is a sound driven tabletop role-playing game, where sound is first class and forms an additional creative axis for storytelling.
Papers
Proceedings of the conference New Instruments for Musical Expression, 2026. NIME'26.
More info
A performance of FM for 8 phones at The Bridge Studios
Pebble
pebble is a world-building game exploring sound as an aid for storytelling. Player’s search for a way home by exploring locations where rocks abound.
In pebble 3-6 players create lost explorers, discover strange lands, cursed people, exploring deadly landscapes of different locations. With fellow travelers they discuss how to survive and, when everything has been explored, choose a route home.