For the past 20 years, the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference (NIME) has served as a hub for musicians and researchers from all over the world to share their late-breaking work on new musical interface design, and to collectively think about the future of this field.
The 2020 edition of the NIME conference took place at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and focused on the theme of Accessibility of Musical Expression.” Many of the conference contributions addressed challenges of making musical expression more accessible,” especially in the context of designing with and for people who have diverse cognitive and physical needs. A plethora of papers addressed musician-centered interaction design, as well as new designs of interfaces for music education and other creative explorations.
Although this special issue of CMJ is not necessarily focused solely on writings around the conference theme, the editors wish to briefly highlight the theme's importance and...