Advances in communication technology have caused fundamental changes in the way people interact with one another. This interaction often occurs with people in isolated environments, and what some may say impersonal settings.
On the other side of the coin to this mediation is the use of technology to enhance communication between people within physical proximity. “Systems enabling large audiences to interact offer numerous possibilities for entertainment, education, and team building”2.
Woolsey and Semper in ‘Multimedia in Public Space’, define public space as being, “Public; that is, they are social, people come to them with other people, to interact or to watch other people doing things. They are spatial; the nature of space and how people use it is key to their design. And finally they are timeless, or to put it another way, the timing of interaction is exceedingly variable and idiosyncratic with the participant.1”
In the American Psychologist, a report suggests that greater use of the Internet leads to shrinking social support and happiness, ”They found a direct correlation between participants level of Internet use and their reports of social activity and happiness. As their use of the Internet increased, the participants reported a decrease in the amount of social support they felt and in the number of social activities they were involved in. They also reported being more depressed and lonely.” (Isolation increases with Internet use, Scott Sleek, 1998).
”Teenagers spend increasing amounts of time immersed in television, video games, and music from their iPods-activities where they listen rather than speak. As a result, they don’t get much practice at communicating clearly with others, and they aren’t exposed to a wide vocabulary” – (Linguistic Anthropology, 2006)
This explains why further research has to be done into the way we use technology. Where and how it is used, and whether more interactive, better design can change these social trends in technology use to create more sociable environments, making use of communal space and for social interaction.’
NATURAL ACTION
A range of products and services are beginning to emerge that have more sensibility to the actions we as humans natural make. Rather than define the action we should make to get a response these technologies are allowing the actions we are already making to have stronger or more extended reactions.
Mega Phone a commercial service for engaging the public in interactive advertising, takes away a lot of the effort associated with other forms of mobile phone controls, no slow SMS typing just call and away you go. By using the natural action of vocals as well as the keypad people can control the visuals on their large-scale screen displays.
Another such example of user input via their vocals is Primal Source, an installation using audio detection devices to determine the volume levels of the audience. A light show in the sky was directly affected by the amount of noise people (estimated at approx. 200,000 over the course of the night) where making. The added benefit here is how the audience encourages the display and the display encourages the audience. The height of the show is reached through a collective excitement. This working together to get the most out of the installations is a nice example of public sharing enhancing the experience for all.
An interface that gained huge public interest this year due to it being featured in the musician; Bjork’s live performances is the Reactable, a round illuminated table interface based on a modular synthesizer.
The table is a multi-touch tangible interface, which works when you place special objects onto the table. The table will recognise it and play a sound or add or modify a sound already playing depending on the object placed onto the Reactable. Also moving these objects around will have certain effects on the audio. The table encourages collaboration to create electronic music.
Garth Paine is an artist who has done a lot of interactive installations that use interaction and audio. One of these installations was called Map1. This installation was held at Span Galleries in Melbourne, Australia. Map 1 explores ways in which humans develop and re-evaluate cognitive mappings of personal relationships with their environment. Human expectations, frustrations, desires and experiences are usually expressed to the outside world as a physical or aural response (Garth Paine, 1998). Map1 uses an installation that uses sensors that gather information on people’s location and also their physical movements within the installation space. This information is then fed to a computer controlled music synthesizer, which plays audio and alters sounds based on a person’s movement with in the space.
The Air Piano is a prototype of a musical interface. This interface is a long thin device that detects hand movements in the air above the Air Piano to play and control software instruments. The Air Piano use LEDs to provide feedback about the users hand movements. The hand movements can control the virtual keys and faders above the air piano, and example of this is if you placed you hand on a virtual key the length of the note is determined by how long you hold your hand on that virtual key. The distance and hand speed also control different aspects of the interface. The Air Piano virtual keys use MIDI messages so that the software know what sound to play, this also allows the Air Piano to be loaded with lots of different MIDI instruments depending on what the outcome required is. Even though it is a prototype of a music interface, this type of interface could be adapted to many different types of applications.
Mobile gesture interfaces a concept by Kitchen Budapest is using as the name suggests gestures much in the same way the previous examples used vocals, “by connecting our characteristic gestures with the inclinometer attached to the cell phone, we don’t need to send a text message anymore, but are able to reach our friends, acquaintances, and colleagues through a simple gesture.3” This application for a technology called accelerometers which are increasingly being built into mobile phones, is another great example of looking towards action that we make naturally and connecting them with natural responses.
Johnny Chung Lee has made a series of applications exploring the potential of the Nintendo Wii remote. The expense of setting up these systems is minimal when considering the possibilities of this technology. Johnny has done 3 examples. Firstly, multi-point interactive white boards where people can write on a wall similar to the use of a Wacom Tablet. This digital information can then be stored/translated to other displays. The other 2 systems Lee has explored so far are fingertip tracking, and desktop virtual reality displays. Each of these examples uses the abilities of the Wii remote in different ways, creating a very comprehensive toolbox for developers of interactive systems. The technology it uses is an infrared camera that will detect infrared light. While the camera and software available have limitation there are a lot of further application of this accessible technology.
PHYSICAL LOCATION/
ENVIRONMENT DETECTION.
Sonar isn’t exactly a new technology, yet a team at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in their project Urban Sonar have combined it with some other common technologies; Bluetooth, Arduino and a heart rate monitor to create an interesting device used for measuring the individuals proximity to other physical objects. This data is recorded and then visualized for later reference.
Radio-frequency identification or RFID has been used predominantly as a new kind of barcode system. One of its most successful applications is the octopus payment system used in Hong Kong for public transport. In addition RFID has great potential for creating interactive systems where identification of objects and/or people is a core theme. RFID has the ability to detect though other physical objects. There have been a number of interactive displays using this technology but in a very experimental manner.
ENVIRONMENTS
Renowned musician David Bryne explored the idea of bring an environment to life with music in his piece Playing the Building. In this work David has turned a building, The Battery Maritime Building, New York, into a giant musical instrument control via a piano. People are invited to stroke the keys on the piano each keystroke resulting in a disproportioned response in another room. We had a meeting with Melbourne based Eness to learn more about interactive environment design. They are definitely all about pushing what they do and developing new and interesting ways of creating engaging space. “We could continue doing what we have done already, there is a market for it. But that wouldn’t be much fun”. Eness develop a lot of their own software and hardware, like Pixile a 3D engine for wrapping projections around objects. The Pixile software also houses a sophisticated particle system that can take on any number of forms, they have variables like colour, speed, quantity, and direction. Pair these with a bunch of input controls like motion tracking, colour detection, audio levels and you have one powerful interactive environment.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MUSIC
Music has had it’s place in society for thousands of years, being found within every human culture known across the globe, today popular musicians are worshipped for their skill and talent. Therefore it’s no surprise that learning the mechanics of music during childhood can heavily work toward benefiting a child’s development. Understanding rhythm and melody can enhance a child’s co-ordination, motor skills and challenge their creative intellect. Whilst the slow process of learning to become proficient at playing an instrument can teach patience, responsibility and increase their self esteem when they accomplish their goal of (for example) playing a piece of music. Studies have also revealed that learning music can enhance spatial awareness, reading ability, verbal memory and mathematic achievement. ”This combination of experiences could have a positive impact on cognition, particularly during the childhood years, when brain development is highly plastic and sensitive to environmental influence”(Huttenlocher, 2002)
Creativity is a talent that is being sought more and more in every aspect of business today, the world is discarding the boring corporate blanket that has controlled the economy for so long and seeking alternative ways to go about business. Technology has enabled endless possibilities whilst also having created a generation unhappy with the rigid confines of a soulless working environment. Technology has also broadened the possibilities of being creative with music, making it far more accessible to be creative in sound with financially accessible software and hardware. The skill is enhanced further when other people/instruments are introduced and focus on teamwork becomes essential. Teamwork within a band creating/writing music involves understanding others wishes and forte’s and compromising to reach goals. Sport has long been the sole provider of teaching teamwork to children, but that need not be true. In any case working together to defeat another team could be seen to encourage competitiveness, where as working together to create is more aimed at self satisfaction, which we believe is more important than “proving yourself” via defeating someone else. One could easily argue that if more people played music together the world would be a happier place!
THE MUSICAL SEQUENCER
The idea of mechanically or electronically playing a musical sequence emerged late in the 19th century with mass-produced Pianola piano rolls becoming a reality in1896. Yet the mechanics of how those early piano rolls operated is still comparable to modern digital sequencers used in contemporary music. A piano roll is a roll of paper with holes punched in it. The position and length of the perforation determines the note played on the piano. The piano roll moves over the ‘tracker bar’, which generally has one hole for each piano key. When a perforation passes over the hole, the note sounds.
Today in the age of creating your own musical sequences on the home computer, the method of arrangement has taken on the form of a virtual modifiable grid, which tells the machine how long for and when to play a specific sound, this is known as step sequencing. The first mass produced and affordable sequencers or drum machines based on the step sequencing grid concept became available in the late 1970s and boomed in popularity in the mid 1980s with the emergence and interest in synthesizers and other digital advancements in music.
We have been researching ways in which the virtual grid of step sequencing can become a more tangible interface, in which the mechanics of step sequencing are immediately clear. The most obvious way would be to construct an actual physical grid so the user could actually see how the sounds are arranged in the arrangement’s entirety at all times. Further research into experimental musical interfaces has encouraged us to expand on the idea of a grid made of squares to possible work with other shapes that can fit together i.e. Hexagons.
Also inspired by research and our initial interest in creating multi user/public interfaces is our eagerness to explore the idea of creating a form of sequencer on a room sized scale. The idea of a group of people (a school group for example) working together to create a sequence of sounds depending how they interact with a space is something we feel could benefit a public exhibition space.
