Abstraction and Activity in Computer-Mediated Music Production

Abstract

ion and Activity in Computer-Mediated Music Production Matthew Duignan,∗ James Noble,∗ and Robert Biddle† ∗School of Engineering and Computer Science Victoria University of Wellington Wellington, New Zealand matthew@duignan.net kjx@ecs.vuw.ac.nz †Human Oriented Technology Laboratory Carleton University Ottawa, Canada robert biddle@carleton.ca Digital audio workstations (DAWs) such as Digidesign Pro Tools, Apple Logic, and Ableton Live are the cornerstone of composition, recording, editing, and performing activities for producers working in popular music (Theberge 1997). Human– computer interaction (HCI) research has a unique challenge in understanding the activities of professional music producers and in designing DAW user interfaces to support this work. Unlike many other user-interface design domains, in computermediated music production the user is principally engaged in the process of building and editing immensely complex digital representations (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983; Pope 1986; Dannenberg, Rubine, and Neuendorffer 1991; Dannenberg 1993). In this case, those representations model the intricate structure and synthesis parameters of the musical composition the producer is creating. Determining the right vocabulary of abstract representations to build into the user interface of DAWs is a difficult problem, and these design decisions have a critical impact on the activity of professional producers. The design of these abstraction mechanisms has been primarily informed by the historical origins of DAWs in multitrack tape recorders and mixing desks (Theberge 2004), which together we refer to as the “multitrack-mixing model.” Our research has identified many ways in which these user-interface metaphors (Barr 2003) from the past often do not support the activities of professional producers. The evolutionary reliance of DAWs on the multitrack-mixing model can be contrasted with more radical algorithmic approaches to composition and performance, such as those found in visual or Computer Music Journal, 34:4, pp. 22–33, Winter 2010 c © 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. textual programmatic tools that are common in the experimental and avant-garde computer-music traditions. Because these tools have a different set of abstraction mechanisms and corresponding tradeoffs, their procedural rather than declarative nature (Dannenberg 1993) and their focus on “generative” music-making render them less well suited to the work of the participants in this study, and therefore outside the scope of this discussion. This article outlines findings from our detailed qualitative investigation (Duignan 2008) into the activity of computer-mediated music-making in the popular idiom, and the abstraction mechanisms that professional producers use to manage the complex digital representations of their compositions for studio work and live performance. We present a framework that articulates the key interactions and tensions between professional producers and the abstraction mechanisms provided by the tools on which they so heavily rely. This framework helps us understand and clearly identify issues that need to be resolved in the next generation of DAW user interfaces. Theoretical Perspective This research was conducted as a collective case study based on Creswell’s Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design (1998), and it exploits the emphasis of case-study inquiry on developing an in-depth analysis of a particular activity. We employed comprehensive semi-structured interviews of professional producers and conducted extended observations of them in the field. We focused on five participants for the in-depth case study, with twelve additional participants who added breadth of 22 Computer Music Journal Figure 1. Music production tools play a vital mediating role between users and their composition. perspective to better support meaningful triangulation and context for the issues that we discovered. We drew from two theoretical traditions with associated research tools in creating our semistructured interview protocol and in analyzing the findings: activity theory and cognitive dimensions of notations. Activity theory (Vygotskii 1978; Nardi 1996) provides us with a useful terminology, a framework for analysis, and a clear catalog of the important components of human activity (Kaptelinin, Nardi, and Macaulay 1999) that we used to develop an interview protocol (Duignan, Noble, and Biddle 2006). Cognitive dimensions of notations (Blackwell and Green 2003) provides a common vocabulary for describing recurring trade-offs in the conceptual models employed by notational systems. Cognitive dimensions have obvious relevance to our inquiry, having been applied to music typesetting and “live-coding” musical systems in the past (Blackwell and Green 2000; Blackwell and Collins 2005). The cognitive dimensions framework provided us with further content for our interview protocol (Blackwell and Green 2000) and a terminology and framework for analyzing the tensions between music production abstractions and the activity of producers.