Music Chair
Main role: Responsibility for the music program for the conference. This includes:
Direct the music reviewing and selection process
Make the music program
Run the concerts during the conference
Prepare the music proceedings for archival
The Music Chair will work closely with the Music Archive Officer.
Before the conference
Create call for participation
The call for the previous year should be used as a starting point. Artistic calls for conferences can vary in terms of expectations so it's important to have clear information. The call for participation should include information about:
formats that are acceptable (e.g., time limits or technical limitations)
the review process.
how to create a submission using the conference artistic abstract template
how accepted submissions will be presented
how accepted submsisions will be archived in the conference proceedings
whether there are special performers/ensembles/equipment/rooms avialable for this specific NIME.
Anonymising music submissions
Music submissions should anonymised on a best efforts basis to help prevent 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 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. :
Starting from 2020, music proceedings are part of the artistic proceedings, which also include extended abstracts describing the accepted installations.
Prepare music documentation
The media recorded during the conference needs to be edited and made available.
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