think carrie, think!

This past Friday, I sat in on one of our weekly Stanford Video Seminar series. They’re basically seminars given by various people invited by Stanford, and broadcast online. Someone in our building thought it would be neat to bring some design spice into this IBM computer science mix (thank goodness), so every Friday, he reserves a room and plays a seminar on some design topic.

So the video lecture I sat in on was entitled “Designing Interfaces for Musical Experience”. It was given by CMU’s very own Tina Blaine (from the ETC). While I learned nothing new from the lecture, she had an exhaustive list of neat musical interface examples covering various domains (single user, multi-player, etc).

Even though I didn’t learn anything new in terms of musical interfaces, some interesting things were brought up and worth thinking about, even if not in the realm of music:

• How does one design for multi-player environments? More specifically, how do you make sure players know the impact they’re having on the environment? If you’re one of 100 involved in an interactive piece, how do you know if your actions are actually having an effect?
• How do you engage interaction and experience in a public space? Thinkwell Design & Production’s The Show (at The Pier at Caesars in Atlantic City) does a great job of this. They’re famous for an intense, five minute fountain show, but when the show isn’t in progress, the fountain becomes an “operator free, interactive” fountain. A fountain that plays games with people, how cool is that. An example of one of the games is Paint the Fountain: “When guests step into a spot of colored light on the floor, the fountain changes to that color and shoots into the air. The more people clustered in the colored light, the taller the fountain plumes. When all the colored light zones reach their maximum, a quick show payoff is performed.” Simple, but it does the trick.

And a partial list of some of the more interesting of her musical interface examples:

Pandora [not so much the music engine, but the Music Genome Project is what's interesting here]
MusicLens [a very neat, though not thorough, way to visualize and search music by type]
GlassEngine [this wasn't mentioned in the talk, but it's related to MusicLens - another great way to search music by type. and a shamless plug for IBM]
DigiWall [an interactive climbing wall using lights and sounds]
Midiball [a "showtoy": a five foot floating balloon with midi triggers, used to get a concert audience to make music by throwing it around]
BeatBugs [cute, handheld percussive instruments, can connect to a network to form a social group of BeatBugs]
AudioPad [a composition and performance instrument, tracking objects on a table for output]
Music Table
Electroplankton [an interactive music and art video game made for the Nintendo DS. Not so much a game as a demonstration of the power of the built-in microphone and the touchscreen of the DS]
PLORK (Princeton Laptop Orchestra)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 and is filed under design, music, work.