Interdisciplinary

One thing that has occurred to me over recent years, is how the new international trend of developing music controllers and instruments, as for example most notably seen at the annual NIME conferences, challenges many traditional roles in music. A traditional Western view has been that of a clear separation between instrument constructor, musician and composer. The idea has been that the constructor makes the instrument, the composer makes the score, the performer plays the score with the instrument, and the perceiver experiences the performance, as illustrated in the figure below. ...

Update 1 December 2022: You may want to check out a newer version of this figure that I made for my latest book. For some papers I am currently working on, I have taken up my interest in definitions of different types of disciplinarities (see blog post from a couple of years ago). Since that time, I think talking about the need for working interdisciplinary has only increased, but still there seem to be no real incentives for actually making it possible to work genuinely interdisciplinary. This holds when working within an academic setting, and it is even more complicated when trying to bridge academic and artistic disciplines. ...

Update 1 December 2022: You may want to check out a newer version of this figure that I made for my latest book. While reading in The biophysical foundations of human movement, I came across a nice illustration (adapted from Zeigler 1990) of the relationships between multi-, cross- and interdisciplinarity. These terms are often used, and I think it helps to have a visual guide for separating them. ...

CIM, Université de Montréal, 10-12 March 2005 This was the second conference trying to gather people working in interdisciplinary musicology, the first being organised in Graz last year, and the next to be organised in Estonia in 2007. I highly welcome such conferences since they really show an enormous width in people attending and topics presented. That is obviously also one of the weaknesses of such a conference since, because of its very interdisciplinary nature, the participants will be non-experts in most of the studies presented. This results in question-sessions where most of the time is spent clarifying and explaning certain topics or terms rather than actually discussing content. ...