Interactive music: Balancing creative freedom with musical development.
Abstract
This thesis is about interactive music, a musical experience that involves participation
from the listener but is itself a composed piece of music and the Interactive Music
Systems (IMSs) that create these experiences, such as a sound installation that responds
to the movements of its audience. Some IMSs are brief marvels commanding only a few
seconds of attention. Others engage those who participate for considerably longer. Our
goal here is to understand why this difference arises and how we may then apply this
understanding to create better interactive music experiences.
I present a refined perspective of interactive music as an exploration into the relationship
between action and sound. Reasoning about IMSs in terms of how they are
subjectively perceived by a participant, I argue that fundamental to creating a captivating
interactive music is the evolving cognitive process of making sense of a system
through interaction.
I present two new theoretical tools that provide complementary contributions to our
understanding of this process. The first, the Emerging Structures model, analyses how
a participant's evolving understanding of a system's behaviour engages and motivates
continued involvement. The second, a framework of Perceived Agency, refines the notion
of `creative control' to provide a better understanding of how the norms of music establish
expectations of how skill will be demonstrated.
I develop and test these tools through three practical projects: a wearable musical
instrument for dancers created in collaboration with an artist, a controlled user study
investigating the effects of constraining the functionality of a screen-based IMS, and
an interactive sound installation that may only be explored through coordinated movement
with another participant. This final work is evaluated formally through discourse
analysis.
Finally, I show how these tools may inform our understanding of an oft-cited goal
within the field: conversational interaction with an interactive music system.
Authors
Murray-Browne, TimCollections
- Theses [3919]