User Configurability and Layout Features

The ten groups used and configured the shared workspace in a variety of ways. While these con- figurations were in some cases emergent, rather than the result of discussion or verbal negotiation, they appeared to be important ways for individuals to keep track of their own contributions, and on a larger scale important for groups to maintain a spatially organised representation or own- ership. Given the importance of module layout during collaboration (and the precedent this has in previous studies of collaboration), a redesigned interface could incorporate additional layout and organisation features to support additional scaffolding for collaboration, awareness and joint attention. These features would not have a direct influence on the sonic output of the software, but could aid groups of people in structuring a collection of interface elements so as to support and scaffold their collaboration. Additional features could include user configurable dividers, partitions, annotations and colour coded areas. The ability to group or bundle associated mod- ules together (e.g., a collection of drum sequencers forming a rhythm) could be another useful feature.

layouts were less inclined to edit the contributions made by others. Designers should therefore keep in mind that supporting spatial layout through interface features might impact on the amount of joint editing which takes place.

In collaborative environments which do not feature a workspace metaphor (e.g., a timeline based sequence application), separate visual representations could be incorporated, as well as other mechanisms to highlight, group or visually organise musical contributions. A new research direction might be to investigate the extent to which these organisational features need to be con- sistently duplicated across all users, and how groups or individuals might exploit the affordances of these features to support personalised and group level organisation of the interface.

6.14 Summary

This study has started to unpack the complexity surrounding the way Public and Personal audio can be presented during CDMI. A key finding was that presenting Public and Personal audio through different devices did not appear to be a successful design decision, as it caused confu- sion and made it difficult for participants to keep track of both channels. Presenting Public and Personal audio through speakers caused less use of the Personal channel, but may have affected the ability for participants to confidently formulate musical contributions by themselves. For some participants, headphones was a more focused listening experience, in some cases leading to increased awareness of others. This plurality of responses suggests that designers should pay particular attention to the way audio is presented in a collaborative environment, as it can have strong and varied effects on users.

The analysis identified spatial organisation strategies in the way the shared interface was used by the participants. These strategies appeared to be independent of the experimental interventions studied, and were in some cases emergent, rather than the result of negotiation between group members. The identification of these patterns led to further analysis of the data, revealing that more spatially territorial groups performed less co-editing.

The findings have suggested a number of design implications for future systems. One im- plication is that using audio delivery as a means of providing awareness information about the activity of others is problematic. The following chapter picks up on the design implications re- lated to the identification of contributions and authors, and performs a detailed analysis of the effects different interface provisions for interrogation of the audio mix have on the way a collab-

orative music making environment. This approach puts participants in control of what awareness information they receive by letting them create their own mix of the musical contributions cur- rently shared within the interface.

Chapter 7

Study Three: Source and Authorship Awareness

The third study of this thesis investigated the effects of two different awareness mechanisms, one for presenting information about the Source of sounds, and one for presenting information about Authorship of contributions. Results suggested that presenting Authorship Awareness discour- aged participants from collectively editing, and encouraged individual work. Source Awareness had a limited impact on the way participants used the software.

The previous study investigated the effects of audio delivery in a collaborative music environ- ment. Analysis showed that when Public and Personal audio were combined and presented through speakers only (rather than headphones or a combination of speakers and headphones), participants were less inclined to use the privacy features of the software to listen to contribu- tions individually. In addition, it was discovered that the groups of participants adopted spatial approaches to arranging the shared workspace, and that this contributed to their ability to manage and maintain awareness of the authorship of contributions. Groups of participants for the most part used the same spatial arrangements in all their conditions, and groups who adopted more strictly separated layouts between group members’ contributions were statistically less likely to co-edit one anothers’ musical contributions. One possible implication of this finding is that an increased awareness of who created a particular musical contribution had an influence on the tendency for collaborators to edit items which they did not initially create.

means of identifying the source of particular sounds within the mix. This behaviour could be regarded as representing a deficiency in the awareness provision of the software, as it indicated participants were re-appropriating other features within the software to compensate for a lack of awareness information pertaining to the source of particular sounds. Furthermore, by routing audio to a personal channel to determine its source, a user would also be disrupting the shared music by removing this sound from the collection of modules routed to other users via the Public audio channel. This could potentially cause interference with the activities of others within the group, particularly if they were currently listening to, or editing a shared musical contribution which was then removed from the Public audio channel by another user. The study presented in this chapter investigates the impact of awareness mechanisms to support both awareness of who contributed, and what the source of sounds are within the interface.

7.1 Authorship (Who) Awareness and Source (What) Awareness

The findings of the previous study indicate that users of a shared environment for collaborative music-making could benefit from an interface which separates the presentation of awareness information about which interface component represents a sound, and who was responsible for creating it. In Study Two, authorship awareness appears to have been maintained through spatial organisation of the interface, while some participants described re-appropriating the Personal audio channel as a means of discovering which modules were creating which sounds.

This leads to the delineation of two distinct forms of awareness within collaborative digital musical interaction. The first is an awareness of who is responsible for the authorship of partic- ular sounds or contributions within the shared music. Secondly; within the shared interface an awareness of what is responsible for producing a particular sound, or in other words, an aware- ness of the sound source. While based in the theory of Workspace Awareness (Greenberg, 1996), these concepts extend the theory to apply to auditory media such as music.

Related concepts have been partially addressed in previous research. Within the context of Acousmatic music, Smalley (1997) used the term ‘Source Bonding’ to describe the attribution of a sound to a known or unknown source, however Smalley’s theory does not touch on the issue of authorship, and is focused primarily on individuals listening to pre-recorded material rather than groups of people co-creating music in real time. Within research on laptop ensembles Merritt et al. (2010) identified the problems of ‘who makes what sound?’ and ‘how is the sound being

altered?’. While their work is highly relevant, it considers musicians using individual or personal means of sound generation, rather than the case of interaction via a shared interface which allows all users to see and modify each others’ contributions. As a consequence of this distinction, the study presented in this chapter addresses the subtly different questions of ‘who is responsible for which sound?’ and ‘which interface element is responsible for which sound?’.

The study presented in this chapter investigates the practical application of these concepts through posing the research questions how do mechanisms for authorship awareness and source awareness measurably alter the way people engage in the process of collaborative digital musi- cal interaction? These questions were addressed by observing the effects of providing different auditory and visual indicators of authorship (who) and sound source (what) awareness in a collab- orative music environment. In particular the study investigates how allowing users to individually isolate audio from different musical contributions and from different people within the on-going musical collaboration affects the process of musical collaboration and the way the collaborative software environment was used to make, share and edit musical contributions. Specific features of interest are quantitative differences in the way individuals use the software as a result of the additional awareness mechanisms, differences in the way groups co-ordinate their activities and the influence of these awareness mechanisms on self-reported measures such as preference.