In this phase of the thesis, I decided to start with the main questions and goals. Questions as: Why? What is the problem? Who cares? Are the leading concerns at this stage. Taking the previous experience of Trinidad as a starting point, and revising the outcomes, in this section I try to define what are the main frameworks where my thesis and project will reside, with the aim to visualize a blueprint of the different areas I will be researching during the thesis year.
Daniel J. Levitin in his enlightening book This is Your Brain on Music [1] exposes the fact that in our times–specially in Western societies–music expression is most of the times exclusively reserved for experts:
“Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners. Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated. Concert halls, dedicated to the performance of music, arose only in the last several centuries.” (p.6)
I don’t consider myself a virtuoso instrumentalist, or even a musician. Musical notation is as foreign as Russian language is to me, and I don’t really understand musical scales. Yet, I’ve been making music for more than fifteen years, and I’ve managed to play in some bands. My sense is that most of musicians don’t really care about the technical aspects of music, they make music because they like it, because it is a rewarding and pleasurable activity and playing with someone else just amplifies those feelings. So I wonder: why the distinction between performers and listeners is so prevalent, when making music is one of the things that fundamentally defines us as humans?
Although people without musical training experience flow in several other contexts, they usually don’t experience it around music creation. One of the main reasons for this is that the learning process of mastering an instrument requires practice, dedication, patience and time. A violin for instance, can take several years to be played with mastery. “I don’t know how to play an instrument, therefore, I can’t participate in music exploration” is the thought sequence that most people follow.
Around this idea, is where my thesis resides and builds the main concerns: How can novices get involved in collaborative musical expression? How can participants experience the state of flow around music creation? What role can play a Design and Technology thesis to address this issue? How can technology facilitate these experiences?
My thesis then will investigate the social interactions in collaborative sound environments, having as the main design question: How can technology facilitate collaborative sound experiences? The aim of the project that illustrates this thesis is to provide a structure where participants are encouraged to achieve a loose state of mind and openness towards sound exploration. This state of mind sets the basis for the development of collaborative behaviors, enhancing the social cohesion between participants that ultimately leading to experience group flow. Setting up small sets of rules for the interaction, the structure should allow emergent play and musical expression, but these should be considered only as means to achieve the desired social experience.
Consequently, the main conceptual framework will then be around these ideas. In the core of said framework is collaboration, where all the components such as the system that supports the experience will aim. Sound, in a second level, acts as one of the means to achieve the social experience. Play, on the other side, acts as a catalyst, and technology, acts as a facilitator for the interaction between people and the whole system.
Finally I outline here some of the key-points or goals for my project:
- Facilitate playful interactions
- Provide a platform for exploration
- Provide a small set of rules
- Allow low level-entry to the sound experience
- Create a fertile ground for the sequence of exploration-discovery-learning-collaboration
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[1] Levitin, Daniel. This is your brain on music : the science of human obsession. New York N.Y.: Dutton, 2006