Musical interaction patterns: communicating computer music knowledge in a multidisciplinary project

The growing popularity of mobile devices gave birth to a still emergent research field, called Mobile Music , and concerning the development of musical applications for use in these devices. Our particular research investigates interaction design within this field, taking into account relationships with ubiquitous computing contexts, and applying knowledge from several disciplines, mainly Computer Music and Human-Computer Interaction. In this paper we propose using the concept of patterns in such multidisciplinary design context. Design patterns are, essentially, common solutions for specific design problems, which have been systematically collected and documented. Since they help designers, allowing them to reuse proven solutions within a certain domain, we argue that they can aid multidisciplinary design, facilitating communication and allowing knowledge transfer among team members of diverse fields. We illustrate our point by describing a set of musical interaction patterns that came out of our investigation so far, showing how they encapsulate Computer Music knowledge and how this was helpful in our own design process.