What is this?
This repository compiles all needed resources to run the experimental protocol detailed and presented in the article "Musical Control Gestures in Mobile Handheld Devices: design guidelines informed by daily user experience" (link to come as soon as it is published).
This experimental protocol aims to allow for a systematized study of how users map mobile handheld device gestures to musical parameters.
It is also part of the larger project Nemmi.
Nemmi stands for Non-Emulative Mobile Musical Instrument and is the PhD project of Alexandre Clément, Digital Media PhD candidate at FEUP. Mobile musical instruments are abundant in the mobile app stores, but most either attempt to emulate traditional musical instruments or approach their interaction and interface design with very specific methods. There is no such thing as a uniformized way of interacting and controlling musical instruments on handheld devices, especially one that is designed with the particularities of those devices in mind. Nemmi is an attempt to exactly that: design a mobile musical instrument that is anchored in user-experience and developed with handheld device operation and specificities in mind.
While developing this project, several prototypes were created, at different stages, in order to test and evaluate different things. With the prototypes came the need to distinguish them, and so the nomenclature NemmiProtoX was adopted (no particular reason for that). NemmiProtoUno is the prototype developed in order to study how users would appropriate the device and represent musical parameters through common control gestures.
Everything needed to reproduce the experimental test in order to verify or expand on the results. Or even expand towards testing with other parameters. We tried to understand how users instinctively mapped Note Onset, Note Pitch, Note Duration and Note Amplitude. The provided resources allow anyone to reproduce this testing, but can easily.
- In the Results and Analysis section you can find the results for the experiment we ran.
- In the Experiment resources you can find all necessary resources to run the same experimental protocol, as well as instructions on doing so.
- In Mobile app source code/NemiProtoUno you will find the Android Studio project for the app needed to run the experiment.
And that's it. Each section has a specific readme file with details regarding its contents. Anything else just feel free to shoot me a message.
Alexandre Clément