Designing Interaction for Computer Musicians

In the world of computer music, interactivity is becoming an increasingly active area of interest. In their roadmap for future computer music research, Serra et. al. [5] emphasise interactivity and controllability as an area that the next generation of research needs to focus on, and there has arguably been a shift within the computer music community from the search for new sound synthesis techniques towards a search for new ways of controlling sound synthesis. Well designed interactivity is an important component of a computer music system; interaction problems can inhibit a musician’s creative process and interrupt flow [1] in performance. My area of research is to examine interaction between musicians and computer systems, and to look at ways in which interactivity can be designed to enable a better musical experience for the user. Although my research to date has not covered shared interaction, it’s extremely likely that it will in the future; playing music is at the core a social activity and collaborative control of digital music opens up new possibilities which need to be considered under my research theme. In this paper I’ll outline my research so far, and look at how collaborative control could be an important part of the next steps.