Music Chair #

Main role: Be responsible for the music program during the conference. This includes:

1. Direct the music reviewing and selection process
2. Make the music program
3. Run the concerts during the conference
4. Prepare the music proceedings for archival

The Music Chair will work closely with the Music Archive Officer.

Before the conference #

Create call for participation #

Here you should collaborate with the other chairs. NIME particularly supports submitting both artistic and scientific contributions (“Paper+Performance”).

For the call it may be particularly good to plan if you are able to provide performers/ensembles or special equipment/rooms.

Anonymising music submissions #

Music submissions should be anonymised in order to help preventing bias during the reviewing process. However, it might be difficult at times to completely conceal the identity of the authors, especially when submitting images or videos necessary for the evaluation of the piece. Therefore, the music chairs should apply a “lean” anonymisation approach based on these basic criteria:

• a music submission should not have any trace of the authors’ names and affiliations in the written material;
• submitting audio and video material should be done using anonymous accounts;
• the identity and affiliations of the authors should not be mentioned in the title, description, or opening/closing credits of the submitted media.

Failure to meet these basic criteria should be brought up by the music chairs and reviewers should bring up any potential conflict arising from knowing the identity of the author.

Peer review #

Peer reviewing is an important part of the music submission process. The general experience is that it is more difficult to recruit reviewers for the music submissions, and the quality of reviews is also much more variable than for paper submissions. It is therefore important that the music chair is in control of the process. In case the reviewing process for a submission results problematic (e.g. highly polarised reviews, program committee members strongly disagreeing or rising concerns) the music chair should moderate the discussion and consider asking the authors to provide a rebuttal and/or additional information in order to clarify and resolve the issue.

During the conference #

The most important role of the music chair is to keep track of rehearsals during day time and concerts at night. It is advisable to compile all the technical requirements of the pieces included in the program in a single spreadsheet and share this information with the tech crew in order to make sure that all the equipment is available before the beginning of the conference.

Documentation #

It is important to prepare good documentation of the events, in the form of high-quality audio and video recordings, as well as pictures.

After the conference #

Prepare music documentation #

The media recorded during the conference needs to be edited and made available.

Prepare Music/Artistic Proceedings #

As of 2019, the music proceedings are made openly available in the form of extended abstracts describing the aesthetic and techncial features of the pieces.

In order for these to be archived and made available on Zenodo and nime.org, files should be prepared as follows:

• a folder with PDFs named using the following naming convention: nimeYYYY_music###.pdf, where YYYY are the four digits of the year and ### the number of the extended abstract (e.g. nime2019_music123.pdf);
• a bibtex file with pointers to the PDF file in the nime.org URL in the bibtex URL field, e.g. :

URL ={http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2019/nime2019_music123.pdf}

Starting from 2020, music proceedings are part of the artistic proceedings, which also include extended abstracts describing the accepted installations.