Accessible Spectrum Analyser

Presented at the 22nd International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-2016)This paper presents the Accessible Spectrum Analyser (ASA) developed as part of the DePic project (Design Patterns for Inclusive collaboration) at Queen Mary University of London. The ASA uses sonification to provide an accessible representation of frequency spectra to visually impaired audio engineers. The software is free and open source and is distributed as a VST plug-in under OSX and Windows. The aim of reporting this work at the ICAD 2016 conference is to solicit feedback about the design of the present tool and its more generalized counterpart, as well as to invite ideas for other possible applications where it is thought that auditory spectral analysis may be useful, for example in situations where line of sight is not always possible

A Guide to Evaluating the Experience of Media and Arts Technology

Evaluation is essential to understanding the value that digital creativity brings to people's experience, for example in terms of their enjoyment, creativity, and engagement. There is a substantial body of research on how to design and evaluate interactive arts and digital creativity applications. There is also extensive Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) literature on how to evaluate user interfaces and user experiences. However, it can be difficult for artists, practitioners, and researchers to navigate such a broad and disparate collection of materials when considering how to evaluate technology they create that is at the intersection of art and interaction. This chapter provides a guide to designing robust user studies of creative applications at the intersection of art, technology and interaction, which we refer to as Media and Arts Technology (MAT). We break MAT studies down into two main kinds: proof-of-concept and comparative studies. As MAT studies are exploratory in nature, their evaluation requires the collection and analysis of both qualitative data such as free text questionnaire responses, interviews, and observations, and also quantitative data such as questionnaires, number of interactions, and length of time spent interacting. This chapter draws on over 15 years of experience of designing and evaluating novel interactive systems to provide a concrete template on how to structure a study to evaluate MATs that is both rigorous and repeatable, and how to report study results that are publishable and accessible to a wide readership in art and science communities alike.Comment: Preprint. Chapter to appear in "Creating Digitally. Shifting Boundaries: Arts and Technologies - Contemporary Applications and Concepts", Anthony L. Brooks (Editor), Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/978303131359

Sonifications for digital audio workstations:Reflections on a participatory design approach

Presented at the 21st International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2015), July 6-10, 2015, Graz, Styria, Austria.Methods to engage users in the design process rely predominantly on visual techniques, such as paper prototypes, to facilitate the expression and communication of design ideas. The visual nature of these tools makes them inaccessible to people living with visual impairments. Additionally, while using visual means to express ideas for designing graphical interfaces is appropriate, it is harder to use them to articulate the design of non-visual displays. We applied a user-centred approach that incorporates various participatory design techniques to help make the design process accessible to visually impaired musicians and audio production specialists to examine how auditory displays, sonification and haptic interaction can support some of their activities. We describe this approach together with the resulting designs, and reflect on the benefits and challenges that we encountered when applying these techniques in the context of designing sonifications to support audio editing

The LuminUs: Providing Musicians with Visual Feedback on the Gaze and Body Motion of Their Co-performers

International audienceThis paper describes the LuminUs - a device that we designed in order to explore how new technologies could influence the inter-personal aspects of co-present musical collaborations. The LuminUs uses eye-tracking headsets and small wireless accelerometers to measure the gaze and body motion of each musician. A small light display then provides visual feedback to each musician, based either on the gaze or the body motion of their co-performer. We carried out an experiment with 15 pairs of music students in order to investigate how the LuminUs would influence their musical interactions. Preliminary results suggest that visual feedback provided by the LuminUs led to significantly increased glancing between the two musicians, whilst motion based feedback appeared to lead to a decrease in body motion for both participants