Designing Interfaces for Collaborative Music Composition

Advancements in technology, ranging from the decreasing cost of PCs and availability of broadband technology through to the spread of mobile computing technology, open up interesting possibilities in collaborative music composition. To-date technology approaches in this field have yet to fully explore all of the possibilities that new technology offers. We believe, that for any advancements to be made in the area of collaborative composition, progress must first be made in the area of notation, for as Bamberger points out “Music notation is a complicated and nonintuitive representation of musical information and for many it is the point at which interest in learning music ceases”[1]. Some successful attempts to overcome the limitations of notation have been based upon informal GUIs and Papert’s idea of a microworld[2]. These systems give the user a chance to build and explore musical concepts in a more intuitive way than with formal notation. Examples of these are Hyperscore[3], Impromptu[4] and DrumSteps[5]. This paper focuses on the tradeoffs in educational functionality that must be made in order to meet the technical challenges presented by deploying software of this kind in different domains. This paper looks at how to tailor one of these composition microworlds, DrumSteps, for use on various platforms that are suitable for collaboration. The paper will outline the design of a version for use with handheld computers. Following which the paper will outline the design of two versions of the software that are suitable for deployment over the internet to be used in asynchronous collaboration environments. In each case we will discuss the trade offs in educational functionality that had to be made to facilitate the new technology.