The STEIM Touch

The story of STEIM and the first sensor instruments in digital music.

The STEIM foundation in Amsterdam was a music studio radically dedicated to the live, physical performance of electronic sound. From 1969 to 2021, the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music supported artists in building new instruments, insisting on tangible, hands-on engagements with electronic sound.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of STEIM’s work, drawing on original interviews and extensive primary source research in the archive of its longtime artistic director, Michel Waisvisz (1949–2008). It traces the studio’s evolution from its roots in the anarchic, situationist spirit of 1960s Amsterdam to the famous Cracklebox and to a long line of pioneering developments in sensor-based instruments between 1984 and 2000.

A primary focus is Waisvisz’s landmark instrument The Hands (1984)—the world’s first sensor-based gestural controller—and the SensorLab platform it inspired. This emerging expertise fuelled an international artist-in-residence programme, attracting figures like Jon Rose, Nicolas Collins or Laetitia Sonami among many others and fostering a global wave of experimental instrument design.

The common thread through this history is a paradigm called Touch, which championed musicians’ embodied presence over automation and predefined control. By documenting the pursuits of immediacy within highly mediated technologies, The STEIM Touch offers a crucial historical lens for today’s ongoing negotiations between artificiality and physicality in music creation.

Andi Otto

Andi Otto is a Hamburg-based sound artist, composer, and performer. His work centers on the exploration of experimental human-machine interfaces in electronic music. He performs with his self-developed sensor bow "Fello," which transforms his cello bow into a gestural sound device. He also builds interactive sound installations and creates real-time sound design settings for dance and theater performances. Otto is a lecturer in the Sound Arts department at the HKB in Bern and co-founder of the record label Pingipung, where he releases music by artists such as Anadol, Umeko Ando, and Marie Klock. He has released six solo albums on international labels, tours worldwide and performs in duo projects with MD Pallavi and F.S.Blumm.