Data around us

Learn the musicians perspective of how data plays an important role in their everyday life

Overview

The theme "Data around us", focuses on music, how people access, collect, manage, analyze, exchange, publish and store their data. This HCI project encourages us to envision how musicians place their recordings alongside intelligently selected interpretations by other artists and compare them with emphasis on tempo, dynamics, melody, & rhythm and use them for better work and life. 

Goals

The aim is to give musicians a new perspective on their play, to assist them in making sense of the data, and through this to ultimately, hopefully, help them improve by UX methods. 

Role

UX Researcher -
Univesity of Zürich

Area

User Research, Discovery, & Ideation, Wizard of Oz, Prototyping

Team

5 students

Duration

Nov - Dec 2017

Client

Empathize

Kicking off with the brainstorming session to formulate a selection of questions and designing a protocol for the coming interview sessions.

The main challenge was to formulate questions in an open-minded way that will yield answers as insightful as possible. The focus during the interview should not only be to dig deep into someone's routine but also to gather a broad understanding of which problems arise.

Qualitative Interviews

During the initial discovery phase, I interviewed young people who are amateur that play an instrument, have a good base, and practice weekly in whatever kind of rehearsal-type activity as well as professional musicians.

• How do you evaluate your rehearsal? 
  "I never rehearse if I’m in a bad mood. There are some days when I don’t feel like playing music or singing. Also, if I have to, I insist on not doing it because it makes no sense like that. If I’m covering a song, I listen to the original and I already know if it’s too high or too deep, so I can already do this in my head or I just try it. "
  Rachel 29 yrs, Band Drummer

• How do you track your progress? 
  "I usually record with my phone while I play, and I got a big directory of videos from the very old ones to the most recent. I also ask sometimes my sister to get a listen or I even send to the friends WhatsApp group-chat my videos and ask for opinions."
  William 27 yrs, Guitarist

Transcription

The next step was to selectively transcribe the results that I conducted. I used notes to narrow down an interesting section that yields insights into how Rachel("R1" in transcription) manages notes and her progress as a musician.

During the transcription, I had come up with additional insights or ideas that I annotated on a separate piece of sticky notes, one insight per sticky note is a good practice.

Conclusion: The process helped me understand the musician's point of view and individuated the critical parts of their workflow. 

One of the biggest challenges with Rachel was to listen and compare in order to improve her practice.

The Problem

Many nuances of higher-level music performance are neglected in the traditional way¹ of practicing music. The conducted interviews suggest that listening is the key to improving beyond being simply somewhat proficient in an instrument. The problem to address is how to bring musicians to listen more and more carefully—to their idols, to their peers, and to themselves.

Interpretation & Affinity Diagramming

Later, the whole team clustered all our notes from the contextual inquiries into an affinity diagram. This method is an exciting way to organize your data after it's collected into patterns, insights, and digestible tidbits. The end goal is to come up with a visual representation of the user's pain-points, desires, and goals.

The detail is elaborated on the sticky note with the number linking to the line in the transcript is shared by other interviewees. 

The next step was to add a category sticky note to represent each group, which helped to segment ideas in different groups. The process made me realize how the workflow of each student was different in the details, yet very similar on a high level. 

We collected second round interview results in order to validate our problem statement

Synthesizing insights & Storyboarding

What do we do with the Affinity diagram? It's time to create some concepts through storyboarding. Our prototype focuses on two phases of a professional musician's path to improvement. The storyboard is prepared by Sebastian Frison.

It enables a device—which is easy to wear and/or interact with—to record music while playing the instrument. Second, when the user finishes playing, the app lets him/her choose the precise part of the song that he/she wants to improve.

An intelligent algorithm looks for different versions of the song (and more specifically the selected part) in its network and returns the visual comparison of the spectral form of the song. The user has 4 different filters at his disposal: change of tempo, dynamics, melody, and rhythm

Our focus for this project is the interaction between the app and the user, NOT the recording device. So, to synthesize in one question: "Which interface design maximizes the improvement?" 

Music Recordings

We recorded different interpretations of the same song, highlighting individual features. These recordings were used to illustrate the important features internally to the group and to the audience during the project presentation. These are the features of play we wish to help musicians become aware of and consider during their practice, so it was important to make sure that everyone involved in the project has a grasp on what is meant by them.

Featuring Tobias Egger on drums and Sebastian Frison on piano.

Rhythm:

Dynamics:

Tempo & Melody:

Prototype-I

The prototype methods consist of the Wizard-of-Oz technique and the mockups are creating in Adobe XD. 

Prototype-II

• Graphs and their axes & units labeled.
• Music notes in melody-view can be enlarged.
• Help Menu [?] added for every view.
• (Unnecessarily distracting/confusing avatars changed.)

Demo Video

Key Takeaways

Music is a very personal thing. Every musician—from hobbyist to professional—has their own way of practicing and improving. One of the few components which we have found to be important across the board is listening—to idols, peers, and oneself. 

In interviewing professional musicians, we have found four aspects they pay careful attention to when listening: tempo, dynamics, melody, and rhythm. We came across few challenges during the prototyping phase like visualizing musical data in a user-friendly way, visualising differences between specific aspects of notes/recordings.

μsic lets musicians place their recordings alongside intelligently selected interpretations by other artists and compare them with emphasis on the above four aspects.

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