More Than a Technical Feature: The Significance of “Touch” in Research on Musical Interfaces

Touch is a key concept in both musical performance and interactive music practice. It encompasses not only physical interaction but also metaphorical dimensions of meaning. However, within the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) archive, touch remains a largely unexamined concept, despite its central importance to computer-mediated music practice. While touch is mentioned in many works, the term carries a variety of often unquestioned meanings. The new study “What NIME Talks About When It Talks About Touch“, conducted by the research group of ECDF Professor Berit Greinke (Universität der Künste Berlin), addresses precisely this issue. The study analyzes the significance of touch in NIME research. The paper by postdoctoral researcher Dr. Astrid Bin was published as a peer-reviewed contribution in the proceedings of the International Conference on NIME 2026.

The study is based on the observation that touch plays a fundamental role in musical interaction, while its significance in research on digital musical instruments has rarely been examined explicitly. To investigate this gap, the authors analyzed all NIME publications from 2001 to 2025. From a total of 119 relevant publications, they identified 526 text passages referring to touch. These passages were then categorized into three overarching themes: Applied Technology and Design, Historical Context and Expanded Discussion. While the first two areas primarily describe technical developments and historical contexts, the third thematic area points to a growing interest in theoretical perspectives from human–computer interaction, music education and philosophy that understand touch as an embodied, relational and meaningful form of musical interaction.

The results shows that, within the NIME discourse, touch is predominantly understood as a technical or functional feature of digital interfaces. Most of the analyzed passages refer to touchscreens, sensing technologies, gesture recognition or the design of touch-sensitive input devices. By contrast, the embodied, expressive, social and relational dimensions of touch have received comparatively little attention. The authors argue that future NIME research should move beyond viewing touch solely as an input modality for digital musical instruments and instead conceptualize it more broadly as an aesthetic, embodied and social phenomenon. A more nuanced understanding of touch could help expand future research on digital musical instruments by incorporating aspects such as materiality, embodiment, expression and interpersonal interaction, thereby providing new perspectives for the design of musical interfaces.

To the publication (Open Access): //here.