Fabio Morreale

Collaborative creativity: The Music Room

In this paper, we reflect on our experience of designing, developing and evaluating interactive spaces for collaborative creativity. In particular, we are interested in designing spaces which allow everybody to compose and play original music. The Music Room is an interactive installation where couples can compose original music by moving in the space. Following the metaphor of love, the music is automatically generated and modulated in terms of pleasantness and intensity, according to the proxemics cues extracted from the visual tracking algorithm. The Music Room was exhibited during the EU Researchers’ Night in Trento, Italy.

Building a Maker Community Around an Open Hardware Platform

This paper reflects on the dynamics and practices of building a maker community around a new hardware platform. We examine the factors promoting the successful uptake of a maker platform from two perspectives: first, we investigate the technical and user experience considerations that users identify as the most important. Second, we explore the specific activities that help attract a community and encourage sustained participation. We present an inductive approach based on the case study of Bela, an embedded platform for creating interactive audio systems. The technical design and community building processes are detailed, culminating in a successful crowdfunding campaign. To further understand the community dynamics, the paper also presents an intensive three-day workshop with eight digital musical instrument designers. From observations and interviews, we reflect on the relationship between the platform and the community and offer suggestions for HCI researchers and practitioners interested in establishing their own maker communities.

Collaborating with an Autonomous Agent to Generate Affective Music

Multidisciplinary research recently has been investigating solutions to offer new experiences of music making to musically untrained users. Our approach proposes to distribute the process of music making between the user and an autonomous agent by encoding this collaboration in the emotional domain. In this framework, users communicate the emotions they wish to express to Robin, the autonomous agent, which interprets this information to generate music with matching affective flavor. Robin is taught a series of basic compositional rules of tonal music, which are used to create original compositions in Western classical-like music. Associations between alterations to musical factors and changes in the communicated emotions are operationalized on the basis of recent outcomes that have emerged from research in the field of psychology of music. At each new bar, a number of stochastic processes determine the values of seven musical factors, whose combinations best match the intended emotion. The ability of Robin to validly communicate emotions was tested in an experimental study (N = 33). Results indicated that listeners correctly identified the intended emotions. Robin was employed for the purposes of two interactive artworks, which are also discussed in the article, showing the potential of the algorithm to be employed in interactive installations.

Twitterradio: translating tweets into music

TwitterRadio is an interactive installation designed to explore the social world of Twitter through music. The idea behind this project is to access the musical domain to display information about the latest trends and news. The system automatically generates tonal compositions that are supposed to match the emotional contents of the tweets, as well as their frequency. TwitterRadio, being an audio-only interactive system, offers more passive enjoyment compared to traditional Interactivity demos. However, the interaction with TwitterRadio can span across a couple of levels, according to their involvement degree. Visitors can limit themselves to listening to the generated music and experience the tweets mood, or enter new hashtags.

In-the-moment and Beyond: Combining Post-hoc and Real-Time Data for the Study of Audience Perception of Electronic Music Performance.

This paper presents a methodology for the study of audience perception of live performances, using a combined approach of post-hoc and real-time data. We conducted a study that queried audience enjoyment and their perception of error in digital musical instrument (DMI) performance. We collected quantitative and qualitative data from the participants via paper survey after each performance and at the end of the concert, and during the performances spectators were invited to indicate moments of enjoyment and incidences of error using a two-button mobile app interface. This produced 58 paired post-hoc and real-time data sets for analysis. We demonstrate that real-time indication of error does not translate to reported non-enjoyment and post-hoc and real-time data sets are not necessarily consistent for each participant. In conclusion we make the case for a combined approach to audience studies in live performance contexts.

Multisensory experiences for singers: a first tangible prototype

When performing a piece of music, body, senses, and cognition are strictly connected to each other. This connection, however, is not always particularly evident. As a consequence, it is extremely important for musicians to be able to control their performance by relying on other sensorial modalities that complement the auditory cue. Sight, in particular, is paramount for most instrumentalists as it helps learning new techniques, recognising errors, correcting expressiveness, and memorize complex passages. As opposed to other musicians, singers can almost exclusively rely on the auditory feedback coming from their voice to adjust their singing. Starting from this statement, we conduct a user study to find possible solutions to provide singers with further feedback during their performance. This paper is a preliminary study in this direction.

Beatfield: An Open-Meaning Audiovisual Exploration

This paper presents Beatfield, a musical installation that allows players to explore an audiovisual landscape by positioning tangible objects on an augmented game board. The underlying idea of the installation was the proposition of an artefact that could encourage heterogeneous interpretations. Beatfield had to offer a multitude of interpretations and ways of appropriating the system; there would be not a right or wrong way to play with it. To this end, the design of the installation integrated related work on open-ended interaction, ambiguity, and appropriation with enigmatic aesthetics, ambiguous interaction strategies, and unpredictable mapping between user input and audiovisual output. The results collected from a user study confirmed the potential of the installation to stimulate a variety of different experiences and interaction strategies.