Supporting Non-Musicians? Creative Engagement with Musical Interfaces

This paper reports on a study which sets out to examine the process of creative engagement of individual non-musicians when interacting with interactive musical systems (IMSs), and to identify features of IMSs that may support non-musician's creative engagement in music making. In order to creatively engage novices, we aimed to design IMSs which would combine the intuitive interaction of `sound toys' with the rich and complex music possibilities offered by IMSs to support individual learning and creative processes. Two IMSs were designed and built and an empirical user study was conducted of them. The study used a multi-layered methodology, which combined interviews and recordings of user interactions. Analysis of participants' behaviour with the IMSs led to the identification of interaction patterns, which were used to identify a three-step framework ('learn', 'exploration','creation') of creative engagement with the musical interfaces, and to inform the development of implications for design for supporting creative engagement with IMSs. Key implications for design identified in this study are to support novices to: learn the sound; play live; catalyze insights; and scaffold composition. The basic study methodology of this paper also offers a contribution to methods for evaluating designs by combining recording user interactions with interviews.