What Makes it Fun? Mapping Playful Interaction in Music-Making with AI

Playfulness in music-making with AI.

Authors

Jingjing Sun*, Francesco Di Maggio*, Rebecca Fiebrink, Corey Ford, Bart Hengeveld, Sebastian Deterding

Venue

NIME '26: International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, London, UK

Type

Workshop

Year

2026

Link

nime2026.org/proceedings/692.html

Link

sites.google.com/view/nime26-workshop/home

Note

* Equal contribution.

Playfulness is a recurring yet undertheorised dimension of digital musical instrument design and human–AI music interaction. Although NIME practitioners have long engaged with playful interaction, the experiential and structural conditions that make musical interaction feel playful have rarely been treated as a primary object of inquiry. This workshop brings together practitioners, designers, and researchers to examine playful AI music systems through hands-on interaction and collaborative analysis.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Sun2026,
  title = {What Makes it Fun? Mapping Playful Interaction in Music-Making with AI},
  author = {Sun, Jingjing and Maggio, Francesco Di and Fiebrink, Rebecca and Ford, Corey and Hengeveld, Bart and Deterding, Sebastian},
  booktitle = {NIME '26: International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, London, UK},
  year = {2026}
}