Online Studio

From this week, all of our studio sessions are changed to online mode. In the studio on Tuesday and Wednesday, we mainly listen to different groups present their original design ideas through the form of Zoom meeting. At the same time, we can give them our own feedback and critique according to their presentation, also, we can better our idea based on the content of others' presentation as our inspiration. In this activity, we got a lot of thoughtful suggestions, which will be very helpful for our future refinement of idea. We can also gain experience from presentations of different groups, such as novel perspectives on thinking problems, interesting interaction methods, novel presentation forms of domains, and implementation methods for similar functions and etc. Reviews for each group can be found in the slack presentation channel. After the presentation session, I have summarized the following points that inspired me in terms of the betterment of our project.

• The use of color.

The idea the emotional bird intends to use color to represent different motion which makes me think of our idea also contains the element color. However, we just use color to distinguish between different tracks which is less innovative. How to use the color wisely might be a tricky part, at present, I am thinking of using color to represent the soundtrack of different frequencies...

• Collaborative experience

When critiquing the Hedgehog, I wondered how multiple users can join in this game and I realized this is also a thought-provoking question that need us to think about. Our idea is to facilitate the collection of interesting sounds around us and try to use them to create a unique and interesting melody, however, we only think how single users can interact with everyday sound and haven't thought about how multiple users can get involved. How can people get collaborative experience will be a tricky part that is worth considering in the future discussion.

Feedback and reflection

In exchanges with tutors and the comments left by our classmates on slack, we have gained a lot of meaningful feedback. We are happy to see that many of our classmates like our idea to play with everyday sound and post on their opinions on how we can better our concept.

Within the in-group discussion, we concluded the following points that are worth thinking over:

• Set some fixed music frames

For someone who is afraid of the mixture of the sound would not that pleasing, they can play the preset audio and then find a way to mix the sound into the track may make the producing smoother.

• Interaction form

This is the question we would like to get answers at the end of the presentation. We are wondering whether the exiting interaction we designed to meet the need of the potential users and what interaction can be added in terms of better meet the users' needs. Based on the feedback we have so far, there are some intriguing suggestion that is worth taking into consideration.

Utilizing liquids of different densities to mix together (for example, oil in water and foam created by soap in water) to represent the combination of different sounds.

Add smoke effects in the clip blending session. Adding this effect will make this procedure more like conducting a chemical experiment, really playful suggestion.

• The way to store music

If a user is interested in multiple pieces of music when he goes out, he needs to take a lot of droppers with him. For the refinement, we need to think of in what way can multiple clips can be recorded in a more user-friendly way.

Future Work

In the next week, we intend to:

1. Conduct in-depth research on feedback, assess the severity of the problem and do the following refinement of the concept.
2. Conduct more background research of the theme - music metric as well as the related technology.
3. Read topic-related literature and find some existing product which is similar to our domain.
4. Design discussions for different target audiences.
5. Start working on the team report.