Lalya Gaye • Outside of Dånk! • Teaching

Mobile Music Technology Course at the Summer School in Sound and Music Computing (KTH, Stockholm, 2007)

Posted by Lalya on 1 October 2007⋅ Comment⋅ Share⋅  Email ⋅  Print
Tags: Interaction Design, interactive music, International, Locative Media, Mobile Music, Prototyping, sound

In 2007, I was a guest teacher at the EU-funded International Summer School in Sound and Music Computing 2007, held at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. (Heads of the summer school: Prof. Sten Ternström and Dr. Roberto Bresin)

The goal of the annual Summer Schools in Sound and Music Computing is to promote interdisciplinary education and research in the field of Sound and Music Computing (SMC). It is aimed at graduate students working on their Master or PhD thesis, but is open to any person carrying out research in this field. The two topics chosen for the 2007 were “Neurosciences and Music” and “Mobile Music Technology“, with a focus on their particular methodologies and research strategies, and with lectures presenting these particular methodologies and their application in music-related problems.

My role during the school was to give the students in-depth insight into the field of mobile music and locative audio and to supervise hands-on activities. My lectures were one of the main parts of the summer school, besides other lectures given about neuroscience and music, hands-on student projects in groups, and panel debates. During my lectures, I gave an overview of existing technologies, and introduced design and prototyping methods. The lectures were completed with audiovisual material, a live demonstration of an ad hoc mobile music sharing system called Push!Music developed by my colleagues of the time at the Viktoria Institute, short tutorials with existing technologies (QRCodes markers and Python), as well as a literature compendium of relevant texts about ubiquitous computing, locative media, key projects and design and prototyping methods widely used in the field of human-computer interaction. In parallel with the lectures, I supervised hands-on group activities where students developed a design proposal of a mobile music application during the period of a week.

Lectures outline

Hands-on sessions: Sound-Scroll mini-project
In the hands-on sessions I supervised during the week, the students developed a project with the theme of mobile music and locative audio technology. The sessions resulted in a design proposal called Sound-Scroll: a phone/PDA-based alternative audio tour guide that lets you hear sounds in connection with the place you are currently at. The sounds can be:

• music curated by artist specifically for this particular place,
• ambient sounds from similar places but in different cities (f. ex. underground/subway sounds),
• or citizen-authored historical guide sounds.

This proposal was imagined and developed through structured brainstorming and design methods, which the students did not have prior experience with. Focus was put on potential user experiences through sketching and narrowing of various design proposals, documentation of outdoor settings, development of personas (a classical user-centred design method), determination of the details of interaction and of the interface, and discussion of possible technical implementations.

The students presented this proposal at the end of the summer school. They illustrated possible uses with the help of a simple user interface prototype implemented during the week, 3 different personas and their corresponding user scenarios.

Resource website
Powerpoint slides, list of literature and sound-scroll mini-project presentation (without corresponding sound files, for copyrights reasons) [link]