Tag: live blog

Why define frameworks? It’s established practice in Human computer Interaction. Because it is useful for designing. they propose heuristics or interaction dimensions.
Existing frameworks have little use in practice. Also ‘interactive installations are often missing (i don’t understand this). Things are very complex and often arbitrary.
He’s showing some cool instruments/installations and aksing us to consider the player’s experience.
their framework is Musical INterface for User Experience Tracking – MINUET
focuses on player experience. it is a design process unfolding time. includes DMIs and interactive installations. (by which they mean they consider installations and notjust instruments)
Design goal: purpose of interactions. Design specification: how to fill objectives.
Design goals are about a high-level user story. Lie a playful experience, or to stimulate creativity, education etc.
Goals can be about people, activities or contexts.
contexts: musical style, physical environment, social environment.
case study: hexagon
An educational interface to train musical perception
they wanted to make it easy to master the iterface ut have a high ceiling for the educational bit.
It’s for tonal music….
speeding through the last slides

Questions

Maraije (sp) wants to know about player, participant and audience as three user types on a scale. More or less informed participants. she also wants to know about presentation, to teach people how to use the instrument or environment.
Interesting points!

Instrument controlled only by rotation of eyeballs!
He’s only found 6 examples of eyeball music.
Eye trackers shine an IR light on your eyeball and then look for a reflection vector with a camera. Callibrate by having users look at spots on a display.
eyes move to look at objects in peripheral vision. Eyes jump fast.
Data is error-prone. Eyes need visual targets. Only 4 movements per second with eyes.
Eyes can only move to focus. So an eyeball piece needs visual targets.
Audiences have nothing to see with eyeball instruments. Also, eyeball trackers are super expensive.
People have built eyeball instruments for computer musicians or for people with disabilities.
He is showing us documentation of 6 existing pieces.
“It’s sad to see a person [who] is severely disabled” says the presenter, and yet nobody in the documentation looks sad at all….

Questions>

Q: Many of the nime performances were designed for people with disability.
A: Ok

Musicans play instruments in unexpected ways. SO they decided to build something and see what people did with it.
appropriation is a process in which a performer develops a working relationship with the instrument. This is exploitation or subversion of the design features of a technology (ie turntablism)
Appropriation is related to style. Appropriation is a very different way of working with something.
How does the design of the instrument effect style and appropriation?
they gave 10 musicians a highly constrained instruments to see if they got style diversity. They made a box with a speaker in it with a position and pressure speaker. the mapped timbre to pressure and pitch to movement. And a control group with only pitch.
People did some unexpected things, like tapping the box, putting the hand over the speaker and licking the sensor (ewww)
The users developed unconventional techniques because of and in spite of constraints
One desgree of freedom had more hidden affordances. The two agrees of freedom had only 2 additional variations and no additional affordances.
Users of the 1 degree of freedom group described it as a richer and more complex device which they had not fully explored. Users of the more complex instrument felt they had explored all options and were upset about pitch range.
The presenter beleives there is a cognitive bandwidth for appropriation. More built options limit exploration of hidden affordances.
This was a very information-rich presentation of a really interesting study.

Questions

Q: Is pitch so dominant that it skews everything? What if you did an instrument that did just timbre?
A: Nobody complained about loudness.
Q: If participants were all musicians, did their primary instrument effect their performance?
A: Some participants were NIMErs, others were acoustic players. They’re studying whether backgrounds effected perofrmance style.

Someone is playing a sort of a squeeze box that is electronic, so you can spin the end of it. Plus it has accelerometers. It’s kind of demo-y, but there’s potential there.
This comes from a movement-based design approach. They came up with the movement first. Design for actions.
Movement-based designed need not use the whole body. It need not be kinecty, non-touch. The material has a physicality.
Now we see a slide with tiny tiny words. It’s about LMA, which is Laban Movement Analysis. For doing a taxonomy of movements. They want to make expressive movement not just for dancers.
Observe movement, explore movement, devise movement, design to support the designed movement. (is this how traditional instrument makes work??)
the analysed a violinist and a no-input mixer. they made a shape change graph. There is a movement called ‘carving’ which he liked. The squeeze box uses the movement and is called ‘the twister’
They gave the prototype to a user study and told them to try moving it (with no sound). Everybody did the carving movement. People asked for buttons and accelerometers (really??)
the demo video was an artistic commission, specifically meant to be demo-y (obvs)

Questions

Laban theory is about ‘effort theory’ about the body. Did the instruments offer resistance?
They looked at interface stiffness, but decided not to focus on it. Effort describes movement dynamics, but is personal to performers.

the Prosthetic Instruments are a family of wearable instruments designed for use by dancers in a professional context. The instruments go on tour without the creators.
the piece was called ‘Les Gestes’ and was a tour in Canada. Instrument designers and composers were from McGill. The choreography and dancing was form a professional dance company in Montreal. Van Grimde Corps Secret.
there were a fuckton of people involved in the production. Lighting gesigners, costume designers, etc all had a stake in instrument design.
One of these instruments was in a concert here and was great. It looks like part of a costume.
The three instruments are called spine, ribs and visors. They are hypothetical extensions to the body. Extra limbs for your body. Dancers wear them in performance. They are removable in this context.
Ribs and Visors are extremely similar. They are touch sensitive. The spine has vertebrae connected by pvc tubing and a PET-G rod.
Professional artistic considerations – durability, usability. backups required. limiting funding and timeframes. small scale manufacturing. How are these stored and transported? what about batteries? Is there anything that needs special consideration or explanation (how to reboot).
Collaboration requires iterative design and tweaking.
Bill Buxton talks of ‘artist spec’, the most demanding standard of design. People have spent year developing a technique and your tool needs to fit in that technique.

Questions

• Why mix acrylic and pvc?
  There is a lot of stress on the instruments, so they use tough materials.
• Can you talk about the dancer’s experiences?
  The dancers did not seek technical knowledge, but they wanted to know how to experience and interact with it. They had preferences for certain instruments.