Crip Design for Collaborative Musical Interfaces: Iterative Development of Bot Party, a Touch-Based Sonic Game

This paper presents the iterative design of Bot Party, a collaborative touch-based sonic game and alt.ctrl musical interface that uses capacitive sweeping for inter-player touch detection and IMU-driven motion control as its two interlocking interaction modes. Developed over seven years through practice-led research grounded in crip design epistemology, the project explores how disability-led approaches to interface design produce novel forms of embodied musical interaction. The system consists of three handheld controllers, each with a distinct musical voice controlled by IMU-driven movement, that generate an evolving collaborative soundscape driven by touch mechanics. Beginning as two separate units (a DIY analogue step sequencer and a custom 555 sound synthesis unit designed for group play), the project evolved through four major iterations exhibited at fifteen public venues. The central contribution I develop here is conceptual: crip knowledge production is not an accommodation of an existing design paradigm, but a generative source for new ones. The practice-based themes of embodied joy, care, distributed choreography, sociality, transgression, and the body-as-instrument are presented as supporting evidence for this claim. This research suggests that crip epistemology can serve as a generative framework for expanding the possibility space of musical interface design.

• https://nime.org/proc/nime2026_78/index....
• https://nime.org