By Oliver Greive, M.S. HCI/d Student at Indiana University Bloomington

Header image: Namroud Gorgius via Unsplash

For the past few weeks, I've been developing an outline for semi-structured interviews while discovering and contacting interview participants. Following this outline, the interviews will address each participant's general relationship with music and explore specific, meaningful moments while creating or performing. The interview questions also dive into the learning process each participant underwent while learning a particular musical instrument or piece of music software.

The participants themselves are a mix of classically-trained and self-taught musicians, amateur and professional producers, artists and creators with performance experience ranging from Soundcloud to Carnegie Hall. I know several participants from my personal life, while others I've been in contact with over social media. I feel this gives a healthy distribution of personalities, perspectives, and backgrounds as I go into the next phase of this project.

As I've developed this research plan, I've also been thinking about the process of learning and creating music overall. I've been drawing examples from this paper by Wu and Bryan-Kinns from Queen Mary University of London. This paper provides a foundation for understanding the creative and interactive process to music technologies. To briefly summarize, the authors explored how non-musicians interacted with a piece of musical software. They summarized the interactive process with this system into three stages in their Thematic Analysis:

"Learn, learning the basic concepts, interaction and sound of the system;

Exploration, exploring the possible music ideas and approaches of making through trial and error;

Create, improvising a structured piece with ideas, techniques and strategies from previous stages." (2017, p 282)

I also reference these stages in a follow-up blog post I wrote outlining this paper and its relevance to my project. In addition, I've been reading various perspectives on creative processes to find a framework that is relevant to this design space. I found this model from Dubberly.com particularly helpful – it outlines the creative process as non-linear, iterative, and recursive:

"The creative process is not just iterative; it’s also recursive. It plays out “in the large” and “in the small”—in defining the broadest goals and concepts and refining the smallest details. It branches like a tree, and each choice has ramifications, which may not be known in advance. Recursion also suggests a procedure that “calls” or includes itself." (Link)

View the full-resolution PDF here

Building off of this model, particularly with the claim: "It plays out 'in the large' and 'in the small'", I'm starting to approach music-making as a domain of systems thinking. From a systems perspective, creating music is defining and adjusting the parameters of a system such as recorded audio, effects, plugins, and EQ parameters. With this in mind, changing one parameter of the system (such as briefly changing a drum pattern) is a change occurring 'in the small' which affects all other parameters 'in the large'. In Music: A Whole Systems Approach, Carolyn Bereznak Kenny from the Santa Barbara Creative Arts Health Center states:

"Music is no longer merely a metaphor to help us describe a phenomenon. Music, according to many physicists and systems theorists, is the way things are. Music is. Music is what happens when things are created, when things become what they are, and particularly when things change." (Link)

I find this stance compelling, especially when paired with the above creative process framework and Wu & Bryan-Kinns' takeaways on interaction patterns with music technologies. To me, learning to create music seems like a process of developing a blend of know-how and sensitivity similar to the 'techno-musical skill' that I outlined in my last post.

To supplement my time exploring how others experience and interact with music technologies, I've been immersing myself by creating music in my spare time. I see this as an exercise in practice-led research and design, as well as a healthy creative outlet. I feel I've gained domain knowledge that would be hard to gather without first-hand exposure.