An Introduction to Musical Interactions

Abstract

The article presents a contextual survey of eight contributions in the special issue Musical Interactions (Volume I) in Multimodal Technologies and Interaction. The presentation includes (1) a critical examination of what it means to be musical, to devise the concept of music proper to MTI as well as multicultural proximity, and (2) a conceptual framework for instrumentation, design, and assessment of musical interaction research through five enabling dimensions: Affordance; Design Alignment; Adaptive Learning; Second-Order Feedback; Temporal Integration. Each dimension is discussed and applied in the survey. The results demonstrate how the framework provides an interdisciplinary scope required for musical interaction, and how this approach may offer a coherent way to describe and assess approaches to research and design as well as implementations of interactive musical systems. Musical interaction stipulates musical liveness for experiencing both music and technologies. While music may be considered ontologically incomplete without a listener, musical interaction is defined as ontological completion of a state of music and listening through a listener’s active engagement with musical resources in multimodal information flow.

Show-and-Tell: An Interface for Delivering Rich Feedback upon Creative Media Artefacts

“…Similarly, non-destructive processing enables feedback recipients to easily compare pre-/post-feedback artefact states, a practice which over time can enhance the practitioners' perceptual skills [33,34]. When examined in the specific context of musical artefacts, our design aligns well with three of the five enabling dimensions to consider for musical interaction as suggested by Chao [3] and these are affordance, design alignment and temporal integration.…”

“…We conclude this paper by discussing insights from this pilot study, focusing on observed issues around clarity, level of detail, control and artistic vision. Through this work, we also aim to make a contribution to the community's understanding of how the interactions with multimodal feedback impact music learning, part of the bigger question around interaction with multimodal technologies and perceptual processing and musical experiences as asked by Chao [3] in MITi's especial issue on 'Musical Interactions' in 2022.…”