Testing Polly Compose App

Birgitta — Sat, 15 Nov 2014 15:31:13 +0000

Rhyme’s design and development team is currently doing the last tests of the Polly Compose APP before the user studies with the families.
In the Polly Compose APP the user can interact with the Interactive things at home, Polly Planet, Polly Ocean and Polly Fire through a smartphone or a tablet (see photos below). Polly Compose has an easy to use graphical user interface (see the two picture in the middle) and text based (twitter) user interface (see picture right) for more advanced music composition.

Testing the tablet interface on an iPad.

First you choose the Polly Compose APP on your desktop. The first, Scenes & Things-screen, of three in the APP opens (see picture to the left).
There you choose Scene (music and visuals) and Thing (Polly Ocean, Polly Fire, Polly Planet). Then hit the [play] button at the bottom (see picture left).

The second screen with the chosen thing in the middle opens (see picture in the middle). Here you can test out the and learn how to play on the thing and how it sounds, before sending the composition to be played on the physical thing at home. You build up a composition by hitting the sensors on the screen representing the sensors on the interactive physical thing. You can also specify how you want the action to be performed (fast, slow, slow etc.). A composition is being built up and visualized over the play and send buttons at the bottom of the screen (see right upper picture).
You play your composition by hitting the [play] button. You send the composition by hitting [send], and you edit (see left lower picture) and save and give it a name by hitting [edit] .
You can go to the first screen and choose another Scene or Thing by hitting [back].

The sent Twitter Composition is received in the Interactive thing. In our example here Birgitta sends a Composition to Polly Planet (see picture lower right) and Polly Planet plays the music and light Composition.

Creating an Open Musical Experience

Birgitta — Fri, 30 May 2014 16:15:38 +0000

The RHYME development team are currently working on creating the music for the 4th generation of RHYME Co-creative Tangibles. The goal is to meet the demands from the users, music therapists and focus groups, to choose the music of their own liking (self-regulation), both well known music and more abstract soundscapes. We edit and de-compose a linear tune into musically significant elements. Elements that the users can re-compose, based on advanced musical rules into a continuous musical experience, by interacting together. The different users, both at home and on a distance, can interact and co-create the music together. The co-creation can be achieved in many ways: through physical interaction in the Co-creative Tangibles; through a graphical iPad interface; or through writing compositions in a high level musical Twitter language on the mobile phone.
The 4th generation Co-creative Tangibles, named Polly, will offer the users a broad range of musical styles from beat-based popular music, children songs, classical music to more contemporary musical experiences. Currently (June 2014) we have about 40 different interactive visual and musical soundscapes the users can select from by choosing preferred Scene Cards with RFID tag. Under are some of the Scene Cards Polly offers so far, but this part of Polly is in continues development, so we can offer new visual and musical experiences :