This dissertation, titled Interactive Music Composition, is a practice based Ph.D. thesis in the field of Musicology. The purpose is to explore if and how one can compose computer based interactive music, that is musically satisfying for an interacting audience, consisting of both laymen and skilled musicians. The text describes the design and reflection in two interactive music installations: Do-Be-DJ, open-air installation in a public park, and, Mufi, with modular and moveable interface. Based on methods and per­spectives in Musicology and Interaction Design, a composition model for interactive music is developed. The model investigates the experience di­mensions listen, explore, compose and collaborate. It also investigates the design dimensions of interaction, narrative structure, composition rule and sound node. The conceptual approach is to apply improvisation and composition methods from jazz, pop and groove based music on interactive music. It also uses the concepts of openess in musical structures and interpretation, musical mediation of actions and meaning and everyday use of music, when composing interactive music. The dissertation contributes to an understanding of how to create composition techniques for interactive music, such as: Direct, varied and shifting response. It reflects on the change in meaning of the musicological terms composition, improvisation, musical work, listener, musician and audience. And on the interaction design terms interaction, gameplay, system and user. The term co-creator is used to describe an actively, interacting and collaborating person, to complement traditional terms like audience, performer and user.

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 explore how we compose sound for an interactive tangible and mobile interface, where the goal is to improve health and well-being for families with children with disabilities. We describe the composition process of how we decompose a linear beat-based and vocal sound material and recompose it with real-time audio synthesis and composition rules into interactive Scenes. Scenes that make it possible for the users to select, explore and recreate different sound worlds. In order to recreate, the users interact with the tangible interface in different ways, as instrument, play with it as a friend, improvise and create music and relax with it as ambient sounding furniture. We discuss composition techniques for mixing sound, tangible-physical and lighting elements in the Scenes. Based on observations we explore how a diverse audience in the family and at school can recreate and improvise their own sound experience and play together in open and non-therapeutic everyday situations. We conclude by discussing the possible impact of our findings for the NIME-community; how the techniques of decomposing, recomposing and recreating sound, based on a relational perspective, could contribute to the design of new instruments for musical expression.

In this paper we present and discuss the empowering potential of restaging interactive art installations. We build on an approach, where wedivide the staging process into four levels of staging (potential, strategic,tactical, dynamic), and in Umberto Eco’s sense open, to four categories ofchoices (genre, temporal, spatial, actorial) to perform on each staging level. We present and discuss how we staged one of our interactive installations at a museum of modern art and a rehabilitation centre for people with severe disabilities. We discuss our staging experience in relation to empowering qualities like; possibilities for self-expression, vitalization, ability to act, co-create, participation and mutual relation building. Our experience was that re-staging art at a radically different place became a provocation that re-vitalized us as creative individuals.

The seven principles of Universal Design, such as ”4. Perceptible Information” and ”5. Tolerance for errors”, are formulated from the design’s or system’s perspective. The principles focus on the qualities of the system or design, not on the value of use, the long time experience and use by many different people. Nor do the principles embrace a cultural and social understanding of the value of things, designs and situations. In this paper we argue for the necessity to broaden this narrow system or product design perspective, when designing to empower diverse users. Our field of study is musical and cross-media Tangible Interaction Design, where multimedia computer capabilities are included in everyday objects. Our goal is to motivate social and musical co-creation for families with disabled children to improve their health and quality of life. To extend our design thinking, practice and understanding of a design’s value, meaning and empowering potential, we build on a humanistic health approach, resource-oriented thinking, Positive psychology and Empowerment philosophy. In the paper we present and discuss how we design cross-media, interactive, tangible and musical things to motivate and empower a variety of users in our on-going RHYME project.

Uppsatsens syfte är att få en förståelse för hur pedagoger arbetar med musik tillsammans med barn i åldern ett till åtta år. Resultatet erhölls genom kvalitativa intervjuer med åtta pedagoger. Undersökningen visade att pedagogerna tycker det är viktigt att använda musik tillsammans med yngre barn, men hur musik används i verksamheten varierade. Av resultatet framgick också att pedagogerna anser att musik är en artefakt i barns språkliga respektive motoriska utveckling. Litteratur som tagits fram för uppsatsen stärker pedagogernas svar. Den teoretiska ansatsen som valts för arbetet är det sociokulturella perspektivet och det pragmatiska synsättet. Detta för att musik är socialt och kan utövas med hjälp av praktiska aktiviteter.

Syftet med föreliggande examensarbete är att undersöka hur förskollärarna uppfattar musikens betydelse för yngre barns språkutveckling i förskolan genom deras arbete med musikundervisning. Den teoretiska utgångspunkten för undersökningen bygger på det sociokulturella perspektivet som utgår från att lärandet sker via samspel och interaktion med andra. Studien har genomförts med kvalitativ ansats där intervjuer med fem förskollärare har gjorts. Bearbetningen av empirin har inspirerats av grounded theory som forskningsmetod där kodning av materialet skett. Resultatet påvisar att förskollärarnas egna intresse av sång och musik är relevant för deras arbete, till exempel hur engagerad och säker/osäker man är på sin egen sångröst. Det sker spontana sångstunder varje dag medan planerade sker ungefär en gång i veckan. De planerade innehåller konkreta bilder, sångpåsar, instrument samt att de använder sig av TAKK och rörelser. Förskollärarna uppfattar att musiken har betydelse för de yngre barnens språkutveckling genom att barnen bland annat imiterar. Barnen kan även uppfatta rytmen i sången och därmed sjunga innan de kan tala. Genom att ha sång -och musikundervisning kan det öka barns ordförråd. 

The aim of the study is, with a special focus on participation, to investigate and elucidate the function and role of music for students in special education for pupils with intellectual disabilities in two municipalities. The subjects that have been highlighted in order to achieve the aim of the study are: the aspects within the music that promote participation, how the participation finds expression and how the music can be used as a tool and support for learning. The sociocultural theory and the theory of situated learning form the theoretical framework of the study. Both have been chosen on the basis that learning is described as a process which is made possible in social meetings and that the knowledge is seen as contextual, situated. Furthermore, the study has a qualitative research approach where the empirical data has been collected through a survey, observations and interviews. The result shows that music, due to its structural and pleasurable characteristics and that it stimulates several perceptions, can function to reach out, invite and unite the participants. It enables an opportunity to use music as a tool when it comes to communicating knowledge in different ways, both physically and intellectually. Music also functions as a common denominator in other subjects and activities. Finally, a picture of how the music, to a greater extent compared with other subjects, appears as a group activity. The social context, with joint attention, that music activity offers, gives participants the opportunity to learn from and with each other in their zone of proximal development.