Prototyping Whole Body Navigation of Musical Harmony

We present a Wizard-of-Oz study where we explored the design requirements needed to transform an existing desktop music application to a system using whole body interaction. The desktop tool used is called Harmony Space [1,2]. It is grounded in two well-established theories of music cognition and perception [3,4] providing a parsimonious, unified, and expressive graphical representation of musical harmonic relationships [1,5,6]. This level of description focuses on objects, locations, shapes, centres, moveable ‘allowed ’ and ‘forbidden ’ areas, trajectories and motions in space, to be navigated while meeting rhythmically-felt, layered, time constraints. This approach makes it possible to characterise such disparate concepts as scales, chords, triads, tonal centres, chord sequences, bass lines, harmonic progressions, modes and modulations, using a single, consistent, parsimonious extended spatial metaphor. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Use