2 research outputs found
Data Driven Analysis of Tiny Touchscreen Performance with MicroJam
The widespread adoption of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets,
has made touchscreens a common interface for musical performance. New mobile
musical instruments have been designed that embrace collaborative creation and
that explore the affordances of mobile devices, as well as their constraints.
While these have been investigated from design and user experience
perspectives, there is little examination of the performers' musical outputs.
In this work, we introduce a constrained touchscreen performance app, MicroJam,
designed to enable collaboration between performers, and engage in a novel
data-driven analysis of more than 1600 performances using the app. MicroJam
constrains performances to five seconds, and emphasises frequent and casual
music making through a social media-inspired interface. Performers collaborate
by replying to performances, adding new musical layers that are played back at
the same time. Our analysis shows that users tend to focus on the centre and
diagonals of the touchscreen area, and tend to swirl or swipe rather than tap.
We also observe that while long swipes dominate the visual appearance of
performances, the majority of interactions are short with limited expressive
possibilities. Our findings are summarised into a set of design recommendations
for MicroJam and other touchscreen apps for social musical interaction