During the past decade, tangible sensor technologies have matured and become less expensive and easier to use, leading to an explosion of innovative musical designs within video games, smartphone applications, and interactive art installations. Interactive audio has become an important design quality in commercially successful games like Guitar Hero , and a range of mobile phone applications motivating people to interact, play, dance, and collaborate with music. Parallel to the game, phone, and art scenes, an area of music and health research has grown, showing the positive results of using music to promote health and wellbeing in everyday situations and for a broad range of people, from children and elderly to people with psychological and physiological disabilities. Both quantitative medical and ecological humanistic research show that interaction with music can improve health, through music’s ability to evoke feelings, motivate people to interact, master, and cope with difficult situations, create social relations and experience shared meaning. Only recently, however, the music and health field has started to take interest in interactive audio, based on computer-mediated technologies’ potential for health improvement. Here, we show the potential of using interactive audio in what we call interactive musicking in the computer-based interactive environment Wave. Interactive musicking is based on musicologist Christopher Small’s concept “musicking”, meaning any form of relation-building that occurs between people, and people and things, related to activities that include music. For instance, musicking includes dancing, listening, and playing with music (in professional contexts and in amateur, everyday contexts). We have adapted the concept of "musicking" on the design of computer-based musical devices. The context for this chapter is the research project RHYME. RHYME is a multidisciplinary collaboration between the Centre for Music and Health at the Norwegian Academy of Music, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), and Informatics at the University of Oslo. Our target group is families with children with severe disabilities. Our goal is to improve health and wellbeing in the families through everyday musicking activities in interactive environments. Our research approach is to use knowledge from music and health research, musical composition and improvisation, musical action research, musicology, music sociology, and soundscape studies, when designing the tangible interactive environments. Our focus here is interaction design and composition strategies, following research-by-design methodology, creating interactive musicking environments. We describe the research and design of the interactive musicking environment Wave, based on video documentation, during a sequence of actions. Our findings suggest some interactive audio design strategies to improve health. We base the design strategies on musical actions performed while playing an instrument, such as impulsive or iterative hitting, or sustainable stroking of an instrument. Musical actions like these can also be used for musicking in everyday contexts, creating direct sound responses to evoke feelings that create expectations and confirm interactions. In opposition to a more control-oriented, instrument and interface perspective, we argue that musical variation and narrative models can be used to design interactive audio, where the audio is seen as an actor taking many different roles, as instrument, co-musician, toy, etc. In this way, the audio and the interactive musicking environments will change over time, answering with direct response, as well as nose-thumbing and changing response, motivating creation, play, and social interaction. Musical variation can also be used to design musical backgrounds and soundscapes that can be used for creating layers of ambience. These models create a safe environment and contribute to shared meaning.

Our voice and body are important parts of our self-experience, and our communication and relational possibilities. They gradually become more important for Interaction Design due to increased development of tangible interaction and mobile communication. In this paper we present and discuss our work with voice and tangible interaction in our ongoing research project RHYME. The goal is to improve health for families, adults and children with disabilities through use of collaborative, musical, tangible media. We build on the use of voice in Music Therapy and on a humanistic health approach. Our challenge is to design vocal and tangible interactive media that through use reduce isolation and passivity and increase empowerment for the users. We use sound recognition, generative sound synthesis, vibrations and cross-media techniques to create rhythms, melodies and harmonic chords to stimulate voice-body connections, positive emotions and structures for actions.

Our voice and body are important parts of our self-expression and self-experience for all of us. They are also essential for our way to communicate and build relations cross borders such as abilities, ages, locations and backgrounds. Voice, body and tangibility gradually become more important for ICT, due to increased development of tangible interaction and mobile communication. The voice and tangible interaction therefore also become more important for the Universal Design field. In this paper we present and discuss our work with voice and tangible interaction in our ongoing research project RHYME. The goal is to improve health for families, adults and children with disabilities through use of collaborative, musical, tangible and sensorial media. We build on use of voice in Music Therapy, knowledge from multi-sensory stimulation and on a humanistic health approach. Our challenge is to design vocal and tangible interactive media that are sensorially stimulating. Interactive media that through use reduce isolation and passivity and increase empowerment for all the users. We use sound recognition, generative sound synthesis, vibrations and cross-media techniques, to create rhythms, melodies and harmonic chords to stimulate voice-body connections, positive emotions and structures for actions.

Our voice and body are important parts of our self-expression and self-experience. They are also essential for our way to communicate and build relations cross borders like abilities, ages, locations, backgrounds and cultures. Voice and tangibility gradually become more important when developing new music technology for the Music Therapy and the Music and Health fields, due to new technology possibilities that have recently arisen. For example smartphones, computer games and networked, social media services like Skype. In this paper we present and discuss our work with voice and tangible interaction in our ongoing research project. The goal is to improve health for families, adults and children with severe disabilities through use of collaborative, musical, tangible sensorial media. We build on use of voice in Music Therapy and studies by Lisa Sokolov, Diane Austin, Kenneth Bruscia and Joanne Loewy. Further we build on knowledge from Multi-sensory stimulation and on a humanistic health approach. Our challenge is to design vocal and tangible, sensorially stimulating interactive media, that through use reduce isolation and passivity and increase empowerment for all the users. We use sound recognition, generative sound synthesis, vibrations and cross- media techniques, to create rhythms, melodies and harmonic chords to stimulate body- voice connections, positive emotions and structures for actions. The reflections in this paper build on action research methods, video observations and research-by-design methods. We reflect on observations of families and close others with children with severe disabilities, interacting in three vocal and tangible installations.

In this paper we present a novel approach towards understanding and design of interactive music technology for people with special needs. The health effects of music are well documented, but very little research has been done and interactive music technology been developed, for Music Therapy and health improvement in everyday situations. Further, the music technology that has been used, exploits very little of the potential current computer technology has to offer the Music and Health and Music Therapy fields, because it is designed and used based on a very narrow perspective on technology and its potential. We present and argue for a broader understanding of music technology for empowerment and health improvement, building on a multidisciplinary approach and combining perspectives from Tangible interaction design with empowerment and resource oriented Music Therapy. We call this concept MusickingTangibles, inspired by the musicologist Christopher Small's important term "musicking". We further present two Musicking Tangibles we have designed, and argue for their empowering qualities based on user observations.

Staging is the creative act of showing something to an audience.When staging, the artist choose and create the context, situationand structure of the presented object, play or installation. The chosen context and situation provide background for the audience interpretations. Meaning is co-created between the artist and audience, based on the cultural and individual understanding of the context and situation. The term installation is open, ambiguous and undefined. One does not completely know what to expect and where to find an installation. It is open towards many interpretations. In this paper we present how we worked with staging of two interactive installations in different exhibition situations, to provoke and motivate different interpretations, expectations and interactions. We argue for staging as a communicative strategy to attract and motivate diverse audiences and user groups to collaborate and co-create through interpretation and interaction. Further we argue that installations have to be open to many possible structures, interpretations, interaction forms and roles the user can take, and shift betweendynamically. When the user dynamically restructure, shift rolesand thereby re-situate the installation, the user is a co-creator in the staging act. We call this dynamic staging.

Montage in cinema means to mount images andsounds from different sources, that are interpreted together and whose oppositions drive the storyfurther. In this paper we develop the montage concept further for co-creation in interactive, tactile, spatial cross-media. As case we use the design of the interactive, tangible, cross-media installation ORFI. ORFI is developed to facilitate collaboration and co-creation between children with severe disabilities and their care persons. In this paper we focus on how we have designed for interactive montage. We present two main types of interactive montage, close and shifted in three dimensions (spatial, temporal and actorial). With the first we mean spatial and temporal closeness, depending on the roles users take and the interpretations they make. With shifted we mean how to use spatial and temporal shifting and distance between the media elements in space and over time, depending on the users’ roles and interpretations. All this to encourage co-creation over time, between a variety of users in different situations.

In this paper we present our ongoing research on designing smart textile solutions for musical tangibles, what we call co-creative tangibles. Our textile, musical tangibles shall be used to improve health and wellbeing for children with severe disabilities and their families, in their homes. We use theories from the Music and Health field as a framework, both for the design process and the design related user evaluations. Building on an ecological and holistic health approach, our main goal is to reduce passivity and isolation, for the child with special needs. To achieve our overall goal, improve health for the users, our textile, musical tangibles have to evoke feelings in the user, be possible for the users to master, create and strengthen social relations and give the users a feeling of wholeness. Because of our ambitious goal, the diversity of users and the varying everyday situation, our musical tangibles have to offer the users a variety of musical actions to perform, and continuous choices of intensity levels and focus of attention. If not, the musical tangibles will lose their interest fast, and lack the relation building qualities we need. Our Music and Health approach therefore demands our textile, musical tangibles not only to be used as an instrument in limited therapeutic session, but in many situations in the users’ everyday lives.