The design of a smartphone-based digital musical instrument for jamming

Abstract

Open-ended human-computer interactions, such as those in interactive digital art and music, are an increasingly popular area of study in HCI. They provide an opportunity to examine playfulness, creativity and expression and challenge conventional HCI notions of quality, evaluation and how to measure success. Jamming-improvisational group music making-is often held up as an example of open-ended creativity. This thesis describes the development of Viscotheque, an iPhone- based digital musical instrument (DMI) designed for jamming, over three major design-test cycles. Over these three iterations the interface evolved from a very simple 'process control' interface in v1 to a more expressive multi-touch sample manipulation tool in v3. At each stage of the design process, open-ended jam sessions held with local musicians suggested that the potential was there for the interface to support rich jamming experiences. Version 3 of the interface and the associated v3 jam session was the most in-depth of the three phases of the experiment, with the most expressive interface and also the most comprehensive field trial (using a multi-session longitudinal study of jamming musicians rather than the single jam sessions of v1 and v2). Situating the qualitative results of these experiments within the broader context of third wave HCI, this thesis discusses 'affect' in a guise perhaps unfamiliar to readers of mainstream HCI discourse. The jam sessions were characterised by intense sonic atmospheres, and the post-jam interviews reveal a complicated picture of agency in the interaction of the musician and their sound. The thesis also presents a detailed analysis of the quantitative log data, including the results of a Machine Learning (ML) approach to looking for patterns in this data. Finally, the thesis discusses the implications of the Viscotheque design process for HCI more broadly, including the powerful affective atmospheres which characterise musical interaction and an approach to data analysis which leverages the mathematical sophistication of modern ML techniques while remaining sensitive to the difficulties surrounding the measurement of experience. -- provided by Candidate. Show more