Header Photo by Spencer Imbrock via Unsplash

By: Oliver Greive, M.S. HCI/d Student at Indiana University Bloomington

As an addition to my first blog post on the UX of music technologies, I will review an academic paper related to my project domain. After searching for a relevant crossover between HCI and music, I found this paper by Yongmeng Wu and Nick Bryan-Kinns out of Queen Mary University of London.

The paper, entitled "Supporting Non-Musicians’ Creative Engagement with Musical Interfaces" was published in 2017, and examines how non-musicians creatively engage with Interactive Musical Systems (IMSs). This research goal is very similar to my own, although at this point I haven't decided to focus on musicians or non-musicians exclusively. Regardless, the authors frame musical experience and creative engagement in a very useful and interesting way. The authors developed interactive prototypes for users to engage with, and conducted formal studies which included interactive and interview sections.

For each of the interactive musical prototypes, the authors led participants through five sub-sessions: free exploration, semi-structured interview 1 , guided learning, creative improvisation, and semi-structured interview 2. I find their approach useful as I begin conducting my own participant interviews. Due to the study's structure, the authors were able to make observations of participants' creative acts in real time (non-verbally, and without distracting the participant) followed by reflective data from the semi-structured interviews. I can see my own research portion structured in a similar way, since I will be explore a similar design problem with slightly different considerations.

The section I find most compelling and relevant to my project is their Thematic Analysis. In this section the authors identify three stages of the participants' interactive processes, pulled from interview transcripts:

"Learn, learning the basic concepts, interaction and sound of the system;

Exploration, exploring the possible music ideas and approaches of making through trial and error;

Create, improvising a structured piece with ideas, techniques and strategies from previous stages." (2017, p 282)

Each stage has several sub-themes which may be relevant to later discussions. For now, I'm thinking of these stages as a loose framework that I can use to structure my desired design outcomes. These themes confirm some prior opinions I've held about the creative process across disciplines, but the paper's small sample size (n=10) keeps me from drawing any major conclusions. Regardless, this paper is helping me structure my approach to both the research and design of my own project.

With this in mind, I'll be clarifying some points about the tools/technologies that are most relevant to my project, along with the key relationships that I identified in the original blog post (eg. software vs. hardware instruments). It was refreshing to see music approached from an HCI and design perspective. The relationship between technology and musical creativity/aptitude is a central theme for this paper and for my own design, so this paper will be very helpful in the coming weeks.

Reference:

Wu, Yongmeng, and Nick Bryan-Kinns. “Supporting Non-Musicians? Creative Engagement with Musical Interfaces.” Supporting Non-Musicians' Creative Engagement with Musical Interfaces | Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition, 1 June 2017, dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3059454.3059457.