Battle of the DJs: an HCI Perspective of Traditional, Virtual, Hybrid and Multitouch DJing

The DJ culture uses a gesture lexicon strongly rooted in the traditional setup of turntables and a mixer. As novel tools are introduced in the DJ community, this lexicon is adapted to the features they provide. In particular, multitouch technologies can offer a new syntax while still supporting the old lexicon, which is desired by DJs. We present a classification of DJ tools, from an interaction point of view, that divides the previous work into Traditional, Virtual and Hybrid setups. Moreover, we present a multitouch tabletop application, developed with a group of DJ consultants to ensure an adequate implementation of the traditional gesture lexicon. To conclude, we conduct an expert evaluation, with ten DJ users in which we compare the three DJ setups with our prototype. The study revealed that our proposal suits expectations of Club/Radio-DJs, but fails against the mental model of Scratch-DJs, due to the lack of haptic feedback to represent the record’s physical rotation. Furthermore, tests show that our multitouch DJ setup, reduces task duration when compared with Virtual setups.