Encumbered Interaction: A Study of Musicians Preparing to Perform
This article summarises a paper authored by Juan Martinez-Avila, Chris Greenhalgh, Adrian Hazzard, Steve Benford and Alan Chamberlain. The paper obtained a Honourable Mention and will be presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2019) on the 8th of May, 2019, in Glasgow, Scotland.
Playing a guitar requires skillful two-handed use. However, when musicians engage in preparation prior to a live performance they often employ a diverse range of resources, such as the Internet (e.g. websites like YouTube or Spotify), hand-written notes, and their sound equipment — all whilst having a musical instrument at hand. This generally results in awkward, clumsy and encumbered interactions. This observation made us question whether guitars should be digitally intervened to support these preparation practices.
Observing the ‘Working Musician’
In order to understand the preparation practices of musicians, as well as the tools and resources used to support them, we set out to capture the activities of musicians in their everyday environments (e.g. their home practice space or rehearsal room). This ethnographic approach to fieldwork is often employed in HCI and CSCW research.
There were 33 participants in total. There was one female for each three male musicians (1:3) and their ages spanned from 19 to 64 years old. In the majority of the cases, participants did not consider music performance as their main source of income, even though they committed extensive amounts of time to preparation work and performances at events. On average, our participants were proficient guitar (or bass guitar) performers who were skilled enough to play extensive musical repertoires on demand (and often on short notice) at different social events (e.g. parties, weddings, etc.) on a regular basis. Hence, they were required to constantly learn and practice songs, which they did through individual and collaborative rehearsal activities.
The Process of Preparation. Through our study we observed a succession from individual to collaborative preparation and a shift of emphasis on the resources that were used in each stage. For instance, during individual practice, musicians initially familiarized with songs by learning their individual parts in detail, whereas in collaborative rehearsal they were expected to be already acquainted with the material in order to facilitate the coordination of complete set lists of songs and related performance details (such as arrangements, order of events, and so on).
Encumbered Interaction. This diverse use of resources is often finely interwoven with musicians’ embodied musical practices. However, interactions with either the resources or the guitar become encumbered as musicians are required to transition between periods of music playing and periods of device interaction. Unsurprisingly, musicians often have their musical instrument at hand and ready to be played when they are engaged in performance preparation even when they transfer their focus to other devices (e.g. a computer or tablet). Nonetheless, we must consider the fact that their instruments are their primary tool to make and practice music.
Opportunities for Guitars
Considering our findings we believe that encumbered interactions during preparation with a guitar at hand present an interesting usability problem that should be addressed in terms of interaction design, technical intervention and musical instrument augmentation. Moreover, we identify three specific challenges that should be tackled to unlock these opportunities — and we offer a potential response for each of them:
- Supporting Encumbered Interaction. During preparation, musician’s primarily focus is on making music by playing their guitars whilst interaction with other tools and resources is secondary and supportive. The first possible solution would be to reduce the transition between playing the guitar and interacting with resources by means of on-board interfaces that allow guitarists to navigate resources. The interaction would be similar to adjusting the volume control on an electric guitar.
2. Supporting Contextual Interaction. As previously mentioned, musicians may rehearse in various contexts, such as their home practice space, a rehearsal room, or a studio. In this sense, particular resources could be associated with particular contexts, meaning that bands would potentially be able to conjure their current song lists as soon as they step in the rehearsal room by means of context-aware computing. Furthermore, resources could be associated with the instruments themselves — an approach that has been implemented with the Carolan guitar.
3. Supporting Connected Interaction. Considering the complex ecology of tools, resources, instruments and musicians involved during preparation work for live performances, another solution to be explored would be to allow the elements within this ecology to share resources and context information by leveraging IoT technologies. In other words, a guitar could potentially ‘talk’ to a computer in order to retrieve a musician’s list of songs and even share them with other musicians across the Internet. An Internet of Musical Things has been previously proposed by other authors — a vision that we also embrace.
While we have set out challenges and responses for potential technological interventions that may be applied to digitally augment the interaction with a guitar and its associated resources, careful research is still required to tailor these strategies to each unique preparation situation across different musical practices and traditions. Currently, the authors’ work is concerned with developing these technological interventions.
We have outlined further solutions in our paper. Please consider reading it or attending our paper presentation at CHI 2019.
Full citation:
Juan Pablo Martinez Avila, Chris Greenhalgh, Adrian Hazzard, Steve Benford, and Alan Chamberlain. 2019. Encumbered Interaction: a Study of Musicians Preparing to Perform. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 476, 13 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300706
