Abstract
The article presents a contextual survey of eight contributions in the special issue Musical Interactions (Volume I) in Multimodal Technologies and Interaction. The presentation includes (1) a critical examination of what it means to be musical, to devise the concept of music proper to MTI as well as multicultural proximity, and (2) a conceptual framework for instrumentation, design, and assessment of musical interaction research through five enabling dimensions: Affordance; Design Alignment; Adaptive Learning; Second-Order Feedback; Temporal Integration. Each dimension is discussed and applied in the survey. The results demonstrate how the framework provides an interdisciplinary scope required for musical interaction, and how this approach may offer a coherent way to describe and assess approaches to research and design as well as implementations of interactive musical systems. Musical interaction stipulates musical liveness for experiencing both music and technologies. While music may be considered ontologically incomplete without a listener, musical interaction is defined as ontological completion of a state of music and listening through a listener’s active engagement with musical resources in multimodal information flow.
Highlights
Music is a structured sonic event for listening
A multimodal interaction requires an instrumentation with multimodal technologies for engineering a site for an actor, which introduces the investigation of interface and affordances
The system implementation needs to be guided by a structural relationship between musical agenda and design directives, so that task domains for generating music resources and design resources are compatible with the target range of musical outcomes and design solutions
Summary
Music is a structured sonic event for listening. This description is inclusive of a listener who is an actor in musical interaction. Composers and performers model listening experiences by being listeners themselves in planned or on-the-fly production of musical events. While there are shared neural resources in both music and language processing as shown in [1,2,3,4], a musical experience is not readily and effectively describable in words. We can state that music, in its initial encounters with listeners, is relatively free from, or defers the kind of syntactic and semantic probing required for language processing. Music appeals to language when a listener wanders through a musical landscape exploring how to describe their listening experiences, to convey meaning to themselves and others by ‘figuring things out’. The ‘things’ here are perceived musical elements or features from a background event, and to ‘figure . . . out’
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