What does the music of the future sound like?

What might the musical instruments of the future look like?
A group of graduate students at NYU are taking a stab at that question. They’ll be performing selections on their invented instruments at the arts and performance space Littlefield, in Gowanus, on Sunday. Tickets are free for NYU ID holders and $10 for the general public.
Buy a ticket ($10)
The event comes out of “New Interfaces for Musical Expression,” or NIME, a course in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Based on an international conference of the same name, NIME is about pushing the boundaries of digital music.
“Laptop musicians often sit at a desk and give performances that feel like watching someone work in their cubicle,” the course description reads. “The idea behind NIME is to go beyond the mouse and keyboard and beyond even piano keys and drum pads. It seeks to present performance systems that make the most out of the new opportunities for musical expression afforded by interactive technologies.”
Indeed, the digital world has allowed for various new avenues of exploring music, several of which are being actively pursued here in Brooklyn. There’s Kaki King, whose guitar performances meld music and electronic arts, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures’ investment in an artificial-intelligence composer and Elizabeth Demaray‘s art installation and research project investigating what music our avian friends prefer. While this reporter, an amateur violinist, still favors the acoustic, it’s exciting to see how tech can deepen the range of an old art form — as well as our understanding and appreciation of it.