A methodological framework for the development and evaluation of user-centered art installations

Background in New Media Sound Art: Immersive art installations can employ technologies that capture movement to control sound manipulation. Intuitive natural mediation between the human body and an immersive environment is key to connecting underlying cognitive processes and sonic environments. Motion capture systems can support, extend and improve natural ways of interacting with musical content. This embodiment aims at meaningfully harnessing and exploiting the relation between body and sound in responsive or interactive music applications.Background in Computer Science: The technological requirements for new media art installations can be met with hardware that registers relevant corporeal articulations to activate sonic content, and with flexible software to support it. In interactive art, issues like input device selection, beneficial mapping strategies, distributed processing and relevant properties for embodied music mediation technologies can be investigated and modularized efficiently.Aims: The goal was to develop a user-oriented design methodology that allows for the extraction, implementation and evaluation of action-reaction couplings in the context of installation art.Main contribution: A user-oriented methodology was developed to evaluate early prototypes of interactive art installations. This methodology is linked with the paradigm of embodied music cognition, currently a pivotal topic in systematic musicology. Our contribution lays a foundation for the development of a modular user-oriented design and development method, envisioning meaningful interaction in new media sound art and computer science. This method holds the promise of improving the design and development cycle of interface installations that operate on the borderline of new media sound art and computer science. We show that the field of systematic musicology provides a natural bridge between these two areas. Consequently, a number of principles from human-computer interaction (HCI) and usability studies were applied throughout different development stages to improve ergonomics and evaluate the technology’s applicability, relevance, functionality and intelligibility, thus guiding future developers towards a better understanding of user-to-system-communication and action-to- sound-coupling-strategies within immersive, interactive environments.Implications: The proposed method provides an elementary but effective strategy to evaluate sonic and visual action-reaction-couplings and advances the field of new media sound art and computer science. The interdisciplinary and user-oriented development strategy we employ improves the quality and quantity of conceivable embodied music mediation applications. It entails progress in the interactivity of individual and collaborative gesture-based music controllers, and is indispensable to eventually achieving ecological validity and the cultural implementation of these types of music mediation technologies.Background in New Media Sound Art: Immersive art installations can employ technologies that capture movement to control sound manipulation. Intuitive natural mediation between the human body and an immersive environment is key to connecting underlying cognitive processes and sonic environments. Motion capture systems can support, extend and improve natural ways of interacting with musical content. This embodiment aims at meaningfully harnessing and exploiting the relation between body and sound in responsive or interactive music applications.Background in Computer Science: The technological requirements for new media art installations can be met with hardware that registers relevant corporeal articulations to activate sonic content, and with flexible software to support it. In interactive art, issues like input device selection, beneficial mapping strategies, distributed processing and relevant properties for embodied music mediation technologies can be investigated and modularized efficiently.Aims: The goal was to develop a user-oriented design methodology that allows for the extraction, implementation and evaluation of action-reaction couplings in the context of installation art.Main contribution: A user-oriented methodology was developed to evaluate early prototypes of interactive art installations. This methodology is linked with the paradigm of embodied music cognition, currently a pivotal topic in systematic musicology. Our contribution lays a foundation for the development of a modular user-oriented design and development method, envisioning meaningful interaction in new media sound art and computer science. This method holds the promise of improving the design and development cycle of interface installations that operate on the borderline of new media sound art and computer science. We show that the field of systematic musicology provides a natural bridge between these two areas. Consequently, a number of principles from human-computer interaction (HCI) and usability studies were applied throughout different development stages to improve ergonomics and evaluate the technology’s applicability, relevance, functionality and intelligibility, thus guiding future developers towards a better understanding of user-to-system-communication and action-to- sound-coupling-strategies within immersive, interactive environments.Implications: The proposed method provides an elementary but effective strategy to evaluate sonic and visual action-reaction-couplings and advances the field of new media sound art and computer science. The interdisciplinary and user-oriented development strategy we employ improves the quality and quantity of conceivable embodied music mediation applications. It entails progress in the interactivity of individual and collaborative gesture-based music controllers, and is indispensable to eventually achieving ecological validity and the cultural implementation of these types of music mediation technologies.A