Running up Blueberry Hill

Abstract

Musical harmony is considered to be one of the most abstract and technically difficult parts of music. It is generally taught formally via abstract, domain-specific concepts, principles, rules and heuristics. By contrast, when harmony is represented using an existing interactive desktop tool, Harmony Space, a new, parsimonious, but equivalently expressive, unified level of description emerges. This focuses not on abstract concepts, but on concrete locations, objects, areas and trajectories. This paper presents a design study of a prototype version of Harmony Space driven by whole body navigation, and characterizes the new opportunities presented for the principled manipulation of chord sequences and bass lines. These include: deeper engagement and directness; rich physical cues for memory and reflection, embodied engagement with rhythmic time constraints; hands which are free for other simultaneous activities (such as playing a traditional instrument); and qualitatively new possibilities for collaborative use.

Bodily Interactions in Motion-Based Music Applications

“…Every user exhibited her/his own motion style while performing a song harmonization, as observed by Holland et al (2009) in similar conditions. Indeed, it seems that, in spite of its motion constraints, the application was able to evoke in the users the longterm sensorimotor information that characterizes personal movement qualities.…”

“…More recent systems, such as Isochords (Bergstrom, Karahalios, & Hart, 2007) or Mapping Tonal Harmony, 10 are also complex environments that require a high degree of knowledge and employ some representation of the harmonic space on a two-dimensional computer screen. Regarding the use of responsive floors for harmonic space representation, 11 an example is provided by Holland himself, who tested a physical space extension of his Harmony Space by adding a floor projection and a camera tracking system (Holland et al, 2009). Harmonic Walk has been compared to rhythm games such as Dance Dance Revolution, 12 where the user is trained to follow a musical input through visual stimuli.…”

The Bodies of TEI – Investigating Norms and Assumptions in the Design of Embodied Interaction

“…While this is not the case for all papers (and even presumably decidedly not for others, e.g., [64]), conventionally cis-male coded culture as show of force [89], skill [103] or expertise [46] further insinuate the assumption of a (white) cis-male body as expected target group. Authors similarly rarely specify the required skills relevant to engage with a specific technology [47], even if increased diversity of bodyminds engaging with a technology might lead to meaningful insights [84]. Additionally, some papers assume technologies as superior to 'the lived body' in that they might guide bodies into developing appropriate skills [132], disregarding potentially ambiguous and individually differing body signals in favour of providing numerical representations as communication starters [128] or translating bodily signals more generally [35].…”