Exploring Collaborative Music Making Through Design Constraints and Collaboration-Driven Digital Music Instruments

This thesis explores the effect of design constraints on the interaction between musicians in collaborative music-making. Although there has been previous extensive research on collaborative music systems, there is limited research on how musicians interact with each other when using digital music instruments. Expanding on past research, three collaborative music making systems were designed, built and studied to investigate the effect of design constraints on collaborative music-making. Three studies were carried out for this research: The first study investigated the effect of beat suggestion and volume-based constraints in three-person collaborative music-making with pitch and timbre controlled DMIs. Results of the study show that whilst constraints can lead to more structured improvisation, the resultant music may not fit with performers’ true intentions. The second and third studies focused on 2-person music-making with drum-pad based DMIs, investigating mapping the volume, timbre and time-based constraints to musical performative parameters. The second study investigated the effects of mapping synchronisation of the co-performers to the volume. The results show that the performers' style and performative approach changed according to the constraint, although the quantitative differences are small. The third study investigated the effects of quantization of the notes of musicians and also mapping note synchronisation of the co-performers to the timbral changes by applying audio effects. The results indicate that the change in the type of constraint resulted in changes in musical style as well as the musical interaction between performers. Moreover, it was found that novices and experts respond differently to quantization and timbre-related constraints. The studies in this PhD contribute towards the design of collaborative music instruments in the field of New Interfaces for Musical Expression and to Human-Computer Interaction research more broadly