Hackable Instruments: Supporting Appropriation and Modification in Digital Musical Interaction

This paper investigates the appropriation of digital musical instruments, wherein the performer develops a personal working relationship with an instrument that may differ from the designer's intent. Two studies are presented which explore different facets of appropriation. First, a highly restrictive instrument was designed to assess the effects of constraint on unexpected creative use. Second, a digital instrument was created which initially shared several constraints and interaction modalities with the first instrument, but which could be rewired by the performer to discover sounds not directly anticipated by the designers. Each instrument was studied with 10 musicians working individually to prepare public performances on the instrument. The results suggest that constrained musical interactions can promote the discovery of unusual and idiosyncratic playing techniques, and that tighter constraints may paradoxically lead to a richer performer experience. The diversity of ways in which the rewirable instrument was modified and used indicates that its design is open to interpretation by the performer, who may discover interaction modalities that were not anticipated by the designers

An agent on my shoulder: AI, privacy and the application of human-like computing technologies to music creation

Human-Like Computing technologies are intelligent systems that interact with people in human-like way. By bringing together the disciplines of Artificial Intelligence, Ethnography and Interaction Design, and applying them in a real world context we are able to understand some of the ways that such technologies can be applied. This work in progress poster applies such technologies to the music creation and develops a design that is based on the notion of an ‘Intelligent’ Agent that is able to support in the music creation process

The gift of the algorithm: beyond autonomy and control

This piece brings together, participation, algorithmic composition and augmentation (as a mechanism by which people can work together to augment and support a composer’s workflow). The performance is about understanding the ways in which composition and performance can be understood, socially, aesthetically and scientifically. This performance becomes a piece of research and design in its own right, a more experimental manifestation of HCI, but it also demonstrates and disrupts conventional production and performance by making the multiple layers of practice and provenance obvious. *See Program notes for a fuller description of the piece for public consumption. We also aim to discuss this further and demo at the Performance workshop that we have submitted. This is part the on going research of the FAST project and aims to engage the wider interdisciplinary Audio Mostly community. • Program notes This piece expands upon Chamberlain’s work into compositional practices that explore autonomy and control, and builds upon the Numbers into Notes system as developed by De Roure. The piece (which is an evolving work) uses the symbolism of the gift to frame parts of the interactions that have occurred in the development of the piece. Individuals are given the chance to create an algorithm. This is made into a physical entity (containing a sequence), which is then gifted to the composer; these together are combined and used to compose a piece. The piece is then performed and given back to the audience (live), of which some members have created the original algorithms. The performance creates a gift, a souvenir, a memento of the experience which some of the audience members can take away. The performance also acts as a way in which we can also understand the interplay between algorithms, art, performance, provenance and participation

Interacting with robots as performers and producers of music

Is it really so strange to think about a robot as something, or perhaps someone that can produce music, as a performer or even as a composer? What happens when robots perform on stage to live audiences, and when they are perceived as intelligent? In this abstract we start to unpack and explicate some of the issues that emerge when the fields of music technology and robotics come together. The aim of this piece of writing is to prompt the Digital Music Research community to engage in debate, in order develop this emerging field of research

Audio in place: media, mobility & HCI: creating meaning in space

Audio-based content, location and mobile technologies can offer a multitude of interactional possibilities when combined in innovative and creative ways. It is important not to underestimate impact of the interplay between location, place and sound. Even if intangible and ephemeral, sounds impact upon the way in which we experience the built as well as the natural world. As technology offer us the opportunity to augment and access the world, mobile technologies offer us the opportunity to interact while moving though the world. They are technologies that can mediate, provide and locate experience in the world. Vision, and to some extent the tactile senses have been dominant modalities discussed in experiential terms within HCI. This workshop suggests that there is a need to better understand how sound can be used for shaping and augmenting the experiential qualities of places through mobile computing

Interaction, instruments and performance: HCI and the design of future music technologies

Rationale There has been little chance for researchers, performers and designers in the UK to come together in order to explore the use and design of new and evolving technologies for performance. This workshop examines the interplay between people, musical instruments, performance and technology. Now, more than ever technology is enabling us to augment the body, develop new ways to play and perform, and augment existing instruments that can span the physical and digital realms. By bringing together performers, artists, designers and researchers we aim to develop new understandings how we might design new performance technologies. Some Topics - Methods and Approaches; What are the methods and approaches that we can employ to understanding interaction and interplay in performance and what impact does technology have on this? - Sonic Augmentation; can performance and sound change the experiential attributes of places, e.g. make them more accessible, more playful? -Physical/digital augmentation; how can one augment one’s self or existing musical instruments and artifacts physically and digitally? - Meaning and Mediation; can people narrate or make sense and movement as part of performance – how does the audience understand this? - Mobility and Immobility; performance and movement, what are the dynamics of performing at rest or whilst mobile, how can technology supported co-located and distributed performance and reception? - Locating Content and Spatialisation; how is performance located, how does sound and performance become part of the spatial fabric and what software tools can support this? - Personalization and Reflection; how can people use new performance technologies to narrate and reflect upon experiences – both as performer and spectator? These are some tentative implications and questions that we expect to address in the workshop. Goals The main goal of the workshop is to bring people together to discuss the issues mentioned previously and to explore this emergent space. As part of Audio Mostly we would like to build this community and develop a network that would engender ongoing participation, debate, scholarship and collaboration. The workshop would also like to encourage early career researchers and PhD students to attend in order to grow the community

Interconnected alchemy: an apparatus for alchemical algorithms

The trope of the fraudulent or occult alchemist, prevalent since the mediaeval period of alchemy’s introduction into European thought, belies the endeavour of practitioners from ancient Egypt onwards. Alchemists used observation, experimentation, and drew conclusions to understand the world around them. Notions of interconnectedness, harmoniousness and codification pervade the alchemical pursuit—and alchemy interconnects literature, art, mathematics, and music....One of our tools is "numbers into notes", a web app for algorithmic composition based on early mathematics, in which the role of the human is to parameterize the algorithm and map number ranges to musical note

Breaking the workflow: Design heuristics to support the development of usable digital audio production tools: framing usability heuristics for contemporary purposes

The investigation that follows presents the results of a series of workshops with professional musicians and music producers. The work here elicits requirements for musicians in terms of software systems. The scope here explores how to design systems to support creativity and collaboration while maintaining a usable system - one which is effective, efficient and satisfies the user. The format models that of similar workshops, where a three-pronged approach is taken to focus on three different types of creativity: exploratory, combinatorial and transformational approaches. Participants describe a story that defines different user roles and expectations. Focus groups help to refine and combine the existing experiences and begin identify ways in which systems can be made more usable, and support more creative ways of working. We consider the broader consideration of usability, including defining and describing different user types and how their views of usability may differ or even be at odds. Our findings show that while existing systems are very good at supporting traditional usability metrics, they may not consider the broader implications of a considered and holistic user experience

Bricolage in a hybrid digital lutherie context: a workshop study

Interaction design research typically differentiates processes involving hardware and software tools as being led by tinkering and play, versus engineering and conceptualisation. Increasingly however, embedded maker tools and platforms require hybridisation of these processes. In the domain of digital musical instrument (DMI) design, we were motivated to explore the tensions of such a hybrid process. We designed a workshop where groups of DMI designers were given the same partly-finished instrument consisting of four microphones exciting four vibrating string models. Their task was to refine this simple instrument to their liking for one hour using Pure Data software. All groups sought to use the microphone signals to control the instrument’s behaviour in rich and complex ways, but found even apparently simple mappings difficult to realise within the time constraint. We describe the difficulties they encountered and discuss emergent issues with tinkering in and with software. We conclude with further questions and suggestions for designers and technologists regarding embedded DMI design processes and tools