A Chasing After the Wind: Experience in Computer-supported Group Musicmaking

Abstract

Improvisational group musics, such as jazz, have their own cultures and conventions of musical interaction. One characteristic of this interaction is the primacy of the experience over the musical artefact - in some sense the sound created is not as important as the feeling of being ‘in the groove’. As computing devices infiltrate creative, open-ended task domains, what can HCI learn from improvisational group musics? How do we design systems where the goal is not an artefact but a felt experience? This position paper examines these issues in light of an experiment involving ‘Viscotheque’, a novel group music-making environment based on the iPhone. Some results are presented, as well as a discussion of the difficult problem of reconciling the participant’s (subjective) descriptions of the felt experience with the detailed interaction data logged by the system.