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....

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....

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. The idea of the model is that when a field becomes more multidisciplinary it can eventually move towards becoming more cross-disciplinary and finally interdisciplinary. Thinking about the two fields that I feel the mostly associated with myself, i....