Identifying Engagement in Children's Interaction whilst Composing Digital Music at Home

Identifying points of engagement from a person’s interaction with computers could be used to assess their experience and to adapt user interfaces in real-time. However, it is difficult to identify points of engagement unobtrusively; HCI studies typically use retrospective protocols or rely on cumbersome sensors for real-time analysis. We present a case study on how children compose digital music at home in which we remotely identify points of engagement from patterns of interaction with a musical interface. A mixed-methods approach is contributed in which video recordings of children’s interactions whilst composing are labelled for engagement and linked to i) interaction logs from the interface to identify indicators of engagement in interaction, and ii) interview data gathered using a remote video-cued recall technique to understand the experiential qualities of engaging interactions directly from users. We conclude by speculating on how the suggested indicators of engagement inform the design of adaptive music systems

Herding cats: observing live coding in the wild

After a momentous decade of live coding activities, this paper seeks to explore the practice with the aim of situating it in the history of contemporary arts and music. The article introduces several key points of investigation in live coding research and discusses some examples of how live coding practitioners engage with these points in their system design and performances. In the light of the extremely diverse manifestations of live coding activities, the problem of defining the practice is discussed, and the question raised whether live coding will actually be necessary as an independent category

A Survey on Service Composition Middleware in Pervasive Environments

The development of pervasive computing has put the light on a challenging problem: how to dynamically compose services in heterogeneous and highly changing environments? We propose a survey that defines the service composition as a sequence of four steps: the translation, the generation, the evaluation, and finally the execution. With this powerful and simple model we describe the major service composition middleware. Then, a classification of these service composition middleware according to pervasive requirements - interoperability, discoverability, adaptability, context awareness, QoS management, security, spontaneous management, and autonomous management - is given. The classification highlights what has been done and what remains to do to develop the service composition in pervasive environments

Assessing user experience of context-aware interfaces in a retail store

Context-awareness is becoming an essential functionality of mobile applications. However, it remains challenging to capture the contextual experience in innovation research, since early-stage technologies have not reached maturity to be implemented in a real-life context. Moreover, users have difficulty in evaluating implicit interactions with context-aware interfaces since imagination of users is limited. Assuming that context impacts user experience, virtual reality (VR) provides an untapped potential for the domain of innovation research. The aim of this study (in progress) is to investigate the potential of user tests in virtual reality (here virtual retail store) for human-computer interaction to better match the needs of users and designers. Initially, the mock-up has been implemented in a retail store with its context-awareness being simulated using the Wizard of Oz methodology (N = 18). This approach is found to be time-consuming and not sufficient for evaluating radical context-aware innovations

Development of active icosahedron and its application to virtual clay modeling

We have developed an active link mechanism for physical man-machine interaction. We report an active icosahedron consisting of intelligent cylinders and its application to virtual clay modeling. Intelligent pneumatic cylinders are newly developed to realize active link mechanisms. This cylinder aims at a novel cylinder in which various sensors and control devices are built. Active link mechanisms are highly integrated and enhanced by intelligent cylinders. A control system is built for the active icosahedron. In the control system, a key element is a control program implementing drawing of a virtual model on display and controlling of active links. Virtual clays are deformed by the program based on the apex positions converted from cylinder lengths. The active icosahedron realized dynamic interaction with virtual objects in PC, showing the potential of the devices as a haptic interface.</p

A Conceptual Framework for Motion Based Music Applications

Imaginary projections are the core of the framework for motion based music applications presented in this paper. Their design depends on the space covered by the motion tracking device, but also on the musical feature involved in the application. They can be considered a very powerful tool because they allow not only to project in the virtual environment the image of a traditional acoustic instrument, but also to express any spatially defined abstract concept. The system pipeline starts from the musical content and, through a geometrical interpretation, arrives to its projection in the physical space. Three case studies involving different motion tracking devices and different musical concepts will be analyzed. The three examined applications have been programmed and already tested by the authors. They aim respectively at musical expressive interaction (Disembodied Voices), tonal music knowledge (Harmonic Walk) and XX century music composition (Hand Composer)

SameSameButDifferent v.02 – Iceland

The history of computer music is to a great extent the history of algorithmic composition. Here generative approaches are seen as an artistic technique. However, the generation of algorithmic music is normally done in the studio, where the music is aesthetically valued by the composer. The public only gets to know one, or perhaps few, variations of the expressive scope of the algorithmic system itself. In this paper, we describe a generative music system of infinite compositions, where the system itself is aimed for distribution and to be used on personal computers. This system has a dual structure of a compositional score and a performer that performs the score in real-time every time a piece is played. We trace the contextual background of such systems and potential future applications

An Analysis of Composability and Composition Anomalies

The separation of concerns principle aims at decomposing a given design problem into concerns that are mapped to multiple independent software modules. The application of this principle eases the composition of the concerns and as such supports composability. Unfortunately, a clean separation (and composition of concerns) at the design level does not always imply the composability of the concerns at the implementation level. The composability might be reduced due to limitations of the implementation abstractions and composition mechanisms. The paper introduces the notion of composition anomaly to describe a general set of unexpected composition problems that arise when mapping design concerns to implementation concerns. To distinguish composition anomalies from other composition problems the requirements for composability at the design level is provided. The ideas are illustrated for a distributed newsgroup system