Critical Reportby Maria Gomez Aguirre

Student Id: 10003413

CMP058N Responsive Environments

MA Digital Media

London Metropolitan University

May 2010

Contents

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 3

MOOD MIXER ............................................................................................................... 3

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 6

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 7

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Introduction

The aim of this report is to position the project developed during the course

within the theories that have been key to the development of multimedia as well

as other installations and works which is based on.

To do this I will start by giving a general description of my project, following by

exposing the theories behind it. To finish I will be illustrating how those theories

have been used for different artists.

Mood Mixer

Mood Mixer is an installation consisting on a computer based environment

where the participant is able to establish a communication with the computer

(user to system – McMillan 2006), which consists in the creation of music

(computer’s response) by choosing a combination of moods (user’s

contribution).

Jensen refers to the work of Bordewijk and Kaam (Jensen 1999) and their

typology that defines four principal communication patterns (Transmission,

Registration, Consultation and Conversation). Mood Mixer fells into Registration

as the information is produced by the user when creating the music but it is

controlled by the information provider (the computer).

The aim of this project is to allow the participant to create content that connects

directly with his emotions or moods. This concept of interactivity has been

studied by Richards (2006) in the article Users, Interactivity and generation,

where he criticises the work of Kiousis and McMillan by arguing that they focus

on “interactivity as a thing in itself as not as a contextualizing facility that

mediates between environments and content and user and enables generation”

(Richards 2006:535). My opinion is similar to Richards’ as I think the new type

of users demand this level of engagement. I will discuss this further later in the

document, but currently the audience is not a passive element in the interaction

but a really active one, who wants to lead the “conversation” just as much as

the other side of the communication (the artist or the system).

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Going back to the context of the Mood Mixer and the idea of generating music I

should refer to the Reactable project, which consist in a new and innovative

music instrument that allows the user to experiment with sounds and control

parameters like volume, effects and loops in order to potentiate his creativity.

The authors developed a complicated system but with a really intuitive interface,

which makes the artwork easy to use and to engage with the user.

Kiousis explains as well that to measure the level of interactivity we should

recognise the responses of the participants and suggests to do so by direct

observation, questionnaires and content analysis (Kiousis 2002). And I think this

subsequent study is an essential complement to any interactive system as it

allows us to compare our expectations while designing the product and the way

it finally goes. Example of how the feedbacks received from users can influence

in the way something works and motivate its modification can be found in

numerous places of our day by day life. Focusing on new media and new

technologies SMS or service of instant messaging is one of the most notable of

the examples. It was first conceived and used for operators as a way to inform

the customers about technical issues (one way communication system).

However, nowadays this channel is mainly use for the customers to

communicate with each other (two ways communication) and even develop its

own language (Wray 2002).

In the case of the Mood Mixer experiment, the study will allow us to prove the

relationship that human beings have with music and how this can be affected by

our personal moods and vice versa.

As I said, the key issue in this project is the study of the moods relating to music

and how this relation influences us. To do so I needed to group all the possible

moods into a clear and manageable classification that allows me to work easily.

This work has already been done for the Music Technology Group in the

Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. They have a significant amount of

projects about music, new ways to produce it and the effects that it has in our

society. Particularly, in one of their conferences (Laurier et al 2009) they explain

the process they followed to achieve a classification of moods. They refer to

other studies like the representation proposed by Hevner (1936) or the MIREX

(Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange) Audio Mood Clasification

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task as a starting point but always linking the results with real data from the

society, by analyzing the emotional tags that people associated to music

through Internet based communities like last.fm. The study finally concludes

that “the basic emotions: happy, sad, angry and tender, are very relevant to the

social network” (Laurier et al 2009: 386).

This concept of associating feelings with the society through the new

technologies, in this case the Internet, has been used for uncountable number

of artistic in interactive projects, mainly during the last decade, as it has been in

this period of time when the Internet has became an essential part of our life.

One of these projects that had specially attracted my attention is We Feel Fine

by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. They created a system that search the

Internet for blog post with the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling” and storing the

rest of the sentence (which is the actual feeling) in a database. This information

is later on processed in such way that allows the author to create an artwork out

of it. The most important part of the process, in my opinion is not this last one,

but having the opportunity to capture feelings and thoughts of people that are

not even close and as they say “making the world smaller”. They as well

explains that this artwork is in constant change because it is based in other

people contributions, which agreed with Richards’ idea of interactivity where the

user is not just a passive participant but he is as well in charge of creating

content.

Another project that plays with emotions and needs the community to exist is

Wall of Sound by Tim Etchells, where he requested to the general audience to

write him about the songs used as support in difficult moments of their life,

songs that have a protection meaning to the audience. The second part of the

project consisted of these songs played by a band of security guards. Apart of

the sociological side of the experiment (that could study for instance the reason

behind the chosen songs), I want to highlight the fact that the project could not

be possible to develop (or be taken into production) without the collaboration of

the audience, which is again the idea of content generated by the user. Also this

raises another concept studied by Richards, which is the positioning of the user

in relation to the content, in other words, the user´s motivation to participate in

the experiment.

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To finalise I would like to agreed with Kreuger (1977: 387-389) when he explain

that responsive environments are not just an artistic representation, but that

they can be used in multiples fields. Using the examples that I cited in this

document we can observe that for instance, Reactable is used as a didactic tool

as it turns something as complex as the creation of music into something

intuitive and simple as moving blocks, and We Feel Fine has sociological

connotations because is giving the opportunity to the user to browse the

feelings stored in the database by setting certain parameters like location,

gender or date. The Mood Mixer can be as well be useful in those fields, as it

may teach the user to associate moods with music and, by storing the

appropriate data it can be used afterwards to study the response of the

participants.

Conclusion

A considerable amount of author has tried to create a standard definition of

interactivity, without any special success. I think this is because the term

interactivity as McMillan says “Interactivity means different things to different

people in different contexts” (McMillan 2006: 205) and it is in constant change, I

mean, a couple of decades ago, interactive system were mainly focusing on

establishing a communication with the user who participated in a passive way ,

while nowadays they try to go one step further by demanding the user to

participate actively and generate content (in some cases this generation of

contents is key for the system, as I explained before). I think, as society

advances in technologic terms, it is demanding new levels of engagement and

collaboration, so going back to the beginning of the paragraph it will be always

difficult to define interactivity.

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Bibliography

Hevner, K. (1936). Experimental studies of the elements of expression in music.

The American Journal of Psychology, Vol 48, no 2, pp 246-268.

Jensen, J., (1999) ‘Interactivity’ - Tracking a New Concept in Media and

Communication Studies in Meyer, P., Computer Mediated Communication,

Oxford Press.

Kiousis, S., (2002) Interactivity: a concept explication, New Media & Society 4;

pp 355-383

Krueger, M., (1977) Responsive Environments. AFIPS 46 National Computer

Conference Proceeding, 423-33. Montvale, N.J.: AFIPS Press.

Lauriel, C., Mahamed, S., Serra, J., Herrera, P., (2009) Music Mood

Representation from Social Tags. Music Technology Group. Universitat Pompeu

Fabra, Barcelona. [online] Available from: http://mtg.upf.edu/node/1466.

(accessed: 26/05/10).

McMillan, S. J. (2006) Exploring Models of Interactivity from Multiple Research

Traditions: Users Documents and Systems. In Lievrouw, L.A, Livingstone, S

(eds) Handbook of New Media Sage, London pp 203-229

Richards, R., (2006) Users, Interactivity and generation, New Media & Society

8; pp 531-550

Wray, R., (2002) First with the message. Interview: Cor Stutterheim, executive

chairman, CMG. The Guardian. [online] Available from:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2002/mar/16/5. (accessed: 26/05/10).

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