Hello!

Sebastian and I have been chipping away at the Floors since 2015 and as our lives have changed, we have grown, ebbs and flows of the project has kept us learning and iterating. It’s been a great process, and one in which many others have gotten involved in bits and bobs.

The Terpsichora Pressure-Sensitive Floors: Design, Implementation, and Refinement from 2015 to 2025

After years of work, we finally have this paper out in Computer Music Journal. I’m so proud of our work and excited to have been able to do it. In this paper, we document all the technical developments that have come from the twists and turns that projects have enabled. I have writing elsewhere (and am doing writing elsewise) that covers the performance elements, but this one is focused on how these floors work now, the iterations in the designs, and where our ideas originated from.

Here is the link: https://doi.org/10.1162/COMJ.a.697

If you don’t have access to it through an institution and want to read this paper, let me know! (wink)

I hope you have fun reading it. We certainly had a lot of adventure writing it. Looking at this version, I’m reminded of the days I spent at the Elder Music Library reading CMJ articles when I was first taking on this project. This work has given me so much more back for what I’ve put into it, and it always makes me believe in dreaming of new possibilities as an undertaking worth a lifetime.

Seb and I are living in different cities these days, but any time spent thinking and drinking coffees together is rich with the tapestry of all the adventures leading up to it. Life can be full of all sorts of adversity, but making of work with friends! what a lark!

Solstice: A new work centred on music, bridging disciplines and creative freedom with instruments

Luna Valentin, the amazingly talented musician and researcher I’m lucky to be friends and collaborators with, presented a poster on our behalf at NIME in London last week.

Here is the link to that paper: https://nime2026.org/proceedings/129.html . (paper pdf link within this one; there's a link to the full performance in the paper also available here)

This paper discusses our piece we made this time last year, entitled Solstice (which we premiered on the June solstice 2025), and the performance and technical explorations within it. We brought a lot of ourselves into this work, and tried to leave behind disciplinary baggage we had picked up along the way. The result was a work that challenged us both, but gave us so much freedom in return.

I had major NIME FOMO last week, knowing some of my favourite friends who are thinkers and tinkerers were in one place and wishing I was with them. It's such a joy to have friends from different circles meet and become new friends, and I cannot wait to get the gossip about how much of that has transpired! Instead, I thought about the sweet instrument makers in my life with love, hung out with some of my favourite dogs, sang songs and ate pizza with my human friends in Melbourne, all whilst sitting around a fireplace.

There is so much to be grateful for, and winter makes the practice of noticing the present taking action really come into the foreground.

With love, from rainy cold Melbourne,

Iran x