DIS 2012 • Workshops
June 11–15, 2012 • Newcastle, UK
Designing Musical Interactions for Mobile Systems Koray Tahiroğlu Atau Tanaka Department of Media Goldsmiths Aalto University, Digital Studios School of Arts, Design University of London and Architecture London, SE14 6NW FI- 00076 AALTO, United Kingdom
[email protected] Finland
[email protected]
Adam Parkinson Steve Gibson Culture Lab School of Design Newcastle University Northumbria University Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU NE1 8ST United Kingdom United Kingdom
[email protected] stephen.gibson@northumbri a.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
era of mobile music research pointed out the ways in which mobile is unique and distinct from traditional computer based interactive music systems. Meanwhile, the creative, interactive focus differentiated mobile music from existing forms of music consumption on portable consumer electronics devices.
Mobile music making is an area where many of the specific design challenges and specific affordances of mobile technologies can be explored. Music applications have often been at the forefront of research in social-interactive aspects of emerging technologies. Music, as a social activity and time-based medium makes demands in terms of intuitive and responsive interactions that later find relevance in other application domains. This workshop will discuss the specific interaction design challenges for deploying engaging and creative musical activities on mobile devices. These devices are characterised by powerful, but not unlimited processing power, touchscreen, small form factor, networking capability, embedded tilt, microphone, camera sensors, and compact GUI. The workshop will allow interaction designers, musicians, and developers who may not already be involved in mobile music development to engage with and learn about this rapidly developing field, and the design research methods that are at the core of creative mobile music applications.
Since the first era of research in this area, the explosion of commercial music apps on the iTunes App Store and the Android Market point to the widespread potential of music on mobile devices. These apps can be broadly divided into several categories:
Author Keywords
mobile music, interactive music, interactive systems
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Music players such as Soundcloud and Spotify
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Music production tools such as Apple’s GarageBand, Intua’s Beatmaker and Blip Interactive’s NanoStudio
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Musical instruments such as Smule’s Ocarina
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Games such as RjDj’s sonic adventure games Dimensions and the Inception
There is a high degree of social interaction integrated into many of these applications. The Ocarina, for example, is not just a mobile wind instrument simulator, it is also links the player to the network of other Ocarina players, putting in place mechanisms for online crowd-sourced peer critique. Outside of single apps, users are able to exploit the suite of apps available on a single device to produce music with one kind of tool, for example instrument or production app, then export and upload a finished song in an music player app, finally sharing the music over social networks.
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation: Miscellaneous. H.5.5 Sound and Music Computing INTRODUCTION
The workshop will foster the exchange of knowledge and facilitate the establishment of best practice on interaction design techniques for creative music systems on mobile devices. Earlier research in mobile music systems, presented in venues such as the Mobile Music Workshops (MMW) and published in NIME demonstrate the potential of mobile technologies as platforms for creative musical interaction for musicians and non-musicians alike. This first
These applications and range of uses hold the potential for democratising the music making process to untrained musicians as they blur the boundaries between games, toys and musical instruments: people ‘accidentally’ make music as they use these apps on their daily commutes, and are able to share their output with friends and broader communities.
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This new form of musical engagement, has for the most part, emerged in an ad-hoc fashion. First generation mobile music research for the most part did not foresee the extent of the social interactions embedded in music making. The
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DIS 2012 • Workshops
June 11–15, 2012 • Newcastle, UK
commercial apps, with several exceptions, have either focused on music consumption with music player apps, or on extending desktop applications. Today, mobile technology brings up a new domain for musical interaction employing interfaces that enable collaborative and dynamic social interaction [9]. The ways in which users have appropriated the suite of available apps, working across them, is a classic example of unintended use in HCI. There is an opportunity to recognise these emergent trends, and to explore and formalise interaction design methods and techniques that respond to emerging use and that address specific affordances of mobile device form factors [4].
broad take up of advanced mobile technology outside the developed world, creative forms of musical engagement may find resonance in non-western musical cultures [6]. If information systems are accessed primarily through mobiles, then questions of software programming and music production on small form factors will be highly pertinent beyond the immediate application area of music. WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES
The main objective of the workshop is to identify and define the interactive social and musical affordances of mobile technologies. The workshop will facilitate the sharing of knowledge between researchers and practitioners in design activities. It will result in a set of interface design models for creating rich musical interaction that push the capabilities of present day mobile phone technologies.
CONTEXT Mobile Music Cultures
The Mobile Music Workshops gathered the community of early adopters in the area of interactive music research to explore mobiles as new platforms for music making [7]. Emblematic projects from this workshop series included TuNA, which allowed forms of serendipity in tuning into the music of others in passer-by interaction [1]. Laptop music ensembles that existed in this time began to spin off mobile music ensembles [11]. In humanities and social science research, musicology and sociology have begun to converge to extend auditory culture studies [3] to the nascent area of mobile music studies [10].
REFERENCES
1. Bassoli, A., Moore, J, Agamanolis, S. tunA: Socialising Music Sharing on the Move in Brown, B., O’Hara, K. (Eds.) Consuming Music Together: Social and Collaborative Aspects of Music Consumption Technologies. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Vol. 35. Springer, Dordrecht. 2006. 2. Brinkmann, P., Kirn, P., Lawler, R., McCormick, C., Roth, M. and Steiner, H. Embedding Pure Data with Libpd. In Proc Pure Data Convention 2011, (2011).
Computer Music Programing Environments
3. Bull, M. Sound Moves: IPod Culture and Urban Experience. Routledge (2007).
Computer music software such as Cubase, Ableton Live facilitate music production. Meanwhile high-level music programming environments such as Max MSP, Pure Data and Supercollider offer musicians to program custom instruments and interactive music systems [8]. The arrival of real time signal processing capability on mobile platforms has resulted the porting of this software to mobile phones [2]. This carries with it the implicit transfer of interaction paradigms to new form factors. This raises the question of whether we imagine programming on the mobile as one would on the computer, how we might imagine modifying the act of programming, a question with broader repercussions in formalising design tasks on mobile platforms [5].
4. Chang, A. and Ishii, H. Sensorial interfaces. In Proc DIS 2006. ACM press (2006). 5. Essl, G. Mobile Phones as Programming Platforms. In Proc. First International Workshop on Programming Methods for Mobile and Pervasive Systems (2010). 6. Irani L., Vertesi J., Dourish P., Philip K., and Grinter R. E. Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development. In Proc. CHI 2010, ACM Press (2010). 7. Kirisits, N., Behrendt, F., Gaye, L., Tanaka, A., (eds.) Creative Interactions - The Mobile Music Workshops 2004-2008. Di'Angewandte (2008). 8. Puckette, M. Max at Seventeen. Computer Music Journal 26:4, (Winter 2002). 31-43.
Societal Effects
There has been a profound societal shift in access to information that has been afforded by mobile, networked devices. Internet access from mobile is one of the fastest growing technology platform in the developing world often in communities where computers are still less commonplace. This includes the development of low-cost smartphones that are distinct from the high-end devices that are better known. Projects like One Laptop per Child are at risk of being outpaced by market developments - some pointing out that the world is rapidly moving towards “One mobile per person.” [3] [4]. These trends point out the potential broader relevance of the proposed workshop. With
9. Tahiroğlu, K. Dynamic Social Interaction in a Collective Mobile Music Performance. In Proc. Social-Com09 Workshops, The First International Workshop on Social Behavior in Music, IEEE Computer Society. (2009). 10. Tanaka, A. Creative Applications of Interactive Mobile Music. (In press) Gopinath and Stanyek (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Oxford University Press (2012). 11. Wang, G., Essl, G., Pentinnen, H. Do Mobile Phones Dream of Electric Orchestras? In Proc. of the International Computer Music Conference (2008).
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