Instrument

RHYME with strong imprints at Music Therapy conference

Birgitta — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 22:08:42 +0000

The RHYME project contributes with three papers, one poster and a round-table to the 8th Nordic Music Therapy Congress. The theme of the conference is “Music therapy across contexts” and is arranged in Oslo at the Norwegian Academy of Music from August 5^th to 8^th 2015.
Four of six RHYME members are contributing at the NMTC conference. Anders-Petter Andersson presents a paper on “Composing Interactive Music for Shifting Between Diverse Contexts”. Birgitta Cappelen presents a paper with the title “Vision for the Future of Music Technology for Music Therapy and Music and Health”. Karette Stensæth presents a poster with the title “Will the future home environment be musical, digital and interactive?” and together with Ingelill Eide the paper “Umberto Eco’s notions ‘The open work’ and ‘A field of possibilities’: New perspectives for music therapy?” Even Ruud is chairing a round-table with the title “From Music Therapy to Music and Health”, a theme of great importance to the RHYME project.
Read the paper abstracts here.

The RHYME book is here!

Birgitta — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 10:31:37 +0000

RHYME member Karette Stensæth has worked very hard for a long time to write and edit the book about RHYME called “Music, Health, Technology and Design”. The book is part of the Book Series from Centre for Music and Health and can be ordered here.

From the back side of the book (see the orange page above):
“Imagine that objects in your home environment – let us say a pillow, a carpet or a toy – became musical and interactive. Do you think that they could offer new ways of playing and being together? Could they even have the potential to reduce isolation and passivity and promote health and well-being for some of us?

This anthology, the eighth in the Series from the Centre for Music and Health, presents a compilation of articles that explore the many intersections of music, health, technology and design. The first and largest part of the book includes articles deriving from the multidisciplinary research project called RHYME (www.rhyme.no). They engage with the study of the design, development, and use of digital and musical ‘co-creative tangibles’ for the potential health benefit of families with a child having physical or mental needs.

Well-known international researchers broaden the picture on the book’s topic in the second part. They ask: How can video-based visualisation techniques of music-related body motion diagnose health problems? How can music therapy practice profit by digitalised improvisation analysis? What are the implications of gender and age in music technology for therapists and the people with whom they work? All together, this book
supplies a broad perspective on its topic, which should be of interest to a wider audience.
The Centre for Music and Health at the Norwegian Academy of Music was established in 2008. The centre conducts research and dissemination. Its goal is to develop knowledge about the connections between music and health.”

Table of Contents
Foreword
Natasha Barrett

Editor’s foreword
Karette Stensæth

Designing four generations of ‘Musicking Tangibles’
Birgitta Cappelen and Anders-Petter Andersson

Vocal and tangible interaction in RHYME
Anders-Petter Andersson and Birgitta Cappelen

An interactive technology for health:
New possibilities for the field of music and health and for music therapy?
A case study of two children with disabilities playing with ‘ORFI’
Karette Stensæth and Even Ruud

Potentials and challenges in interactive and musical collaborations involving children with disparate disabilities
A comparison study of how Petronella, with Down syndrome, and Dylan, with autism, interact with the musical and interactive tangible ‘WAVE’
Karette Stensæth

‘Come sing, dance and relax with me!’
Exploring interactive ‘health musicking’ between a girl with disabilities and her family playing with ‘REFLECT’ (A case study)
Karette Stensæth

‘FIELD AND AGENT’: Health and characteristic dualities in the co-creative, interactive and musical tangibles in the RHYME project
Ingelill Eide

Health affordances of the RHYME artefacts
Even Ruud

PARTICIPATION: A combined perspective on the concept from the fields of informatics and music and health
Karette Stensæth, Harald Holone, and Jo Herstad

From experimental music technology to clinical tool
Alexander Refsum Jensenius

Technology and clinical improvisation – from production and playback to analysis and interpretation
Jaakko Erkkilä, Esa Ala-Ruona, and Olivier Lartillot

Using electronic and digital technologies in music therapy: the implications of gender and age for therapists and the people with whom they work
Wendy L. Magee

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.

RHYME at NIME 2014

Birgitta — Mon, 04 Aug 2014 09:52:37 +0000

On 3rd July RHYME member Anders-Petter Andersson made a presentation of a paper by himself, Birgitta Cappelen and Fredrik Olofsson at NIME 2014. The title of their paper is “Designing Sound for Recreation and Well-Being”. NIME, New Interfaces for Musical Expression, is the most important conference and community within music and technology. RHYME has for several years now been one of the few projects in this community focusing on developing musical artefacts and expression in a health related context. This is the third time RHYME has published at the NIME conference. NIME 2014 was held at Goldsmiths College at University of London, 30 June – 4 July 2014.

RHYME at ESSA 2014

Birgitta — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 16:16:55 +0000

On 29th of June RHYME member Anders-Petter Andersson held a presentation on the ESSA 2014 Conference. ESSA is the European Sound Studies Association annual conference. This time the Conference name was Sound Studies: Mapping the Field and was held in Copenhagen from 27th to 29 of June 2014.
ESSA is a community that has emerged from various traditional disciplines within the humanities and social sciences related to sound and music, such as musicology, art history, media and cultural studies, psychology, architecture and urban planning. Sound studies has been associated with inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches.
Anders-Petter Andersson presentation was titled “Creating Musical Actors” and is about the musical work in RHYME and Polly, the 4th generation of Co-creative Tangibles.

In his presentation Andersson argues that music is not longer only the sound object, instrument or piece of art, but the services around it. These are services in the form of actors with characters that behave coherent as they answer back musically, take initiative and develop over time. With perspectives from drama, game theory, actor-network-theory as well as from learning theories on motivation, Andersson explores two design cases from RHYME.

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 :

Video of the 3rd Generation student projects are online!

Birgitta — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 01:12:30 +0000

Here are videoes of the student projects from the Sensorial and Musical Interaction course at AHO 2012. Stian Ruud recorded video during the exhibition 2. November and edited short video clips to put on Vimeo. All the Musicking Tangibles are wireless and run by iPodTouch and RHYMEs breakout card kDevice, which uses Bluetooth. The Tangibles use various sensors like pressure touch, RFID, microphone and accelerometers to play and vary the music. All music programming is done in SuperCollider. All installations has LEDs included in the textile that vary with the interaction and music. The Stump Drum also has vibrators as output in its arms. Watch the video clips here below. You can find more information of the project by clicking on the project names.

Whispering Willow

Amazing student projects

Birgitta — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:00:38 +0000

Friday 2. November the master course in Tangible Interaction, Sensorial and Musical Interaction at AHO, ended with an open student presentation and exhibition. Birgitta started the presentation by giving an overview over the RHYME project, the student courses led by RHYME from 2010 to 2012 and the design challenges we have in this field. It stared with a 2 week course in E-textile in 2010 to a 3 week course in E-textile and Musical Interaction in 2011 to a 4 week course in Sensorial and Musical Interaction this year. The first week the students created “sensorial sensors“, the next week 3 new Musicking Tangible concepts and the last two the developed one concept to a final working model. After the introduction the 6 student groups gave their presentation of their process to their end result: Stump Drum, Dynamic Rock, Cove, Chilli Net, Ebbe, and Whispering Willow. More information about each project will come later. Link to some process pictures. And below are some pictures from the exhibition:

Students create new Musicking Tangibles concepts

Birgitta — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:22:52 +0000

The second week of the course Sensorial and Musical interaction the students assignment was to develop new concepts of Musicking Tangibles. The Musicking Tangibles had to be wireless, interactive things, that motivated the whole family to music together in their home. The concepts should build on RHYME’s last developed hardware platform kDevice. kDevice is a Bluetooth based extention card to smartphone/ iPod Touch to add additional sensors and actuators like LEDs. The interactive music is written in SuperCollider, which runs on the smartphone. The six groups presented 3 new concepts each and a working technical sketch. The last week the students will develop one concept for the final presentation 2. November.

RHYME keynote and workshop at NMTC 2012

Birgitta — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 09:44:57 +0000

We are very proud and happy that Karette Stensæth was invited to hold a keynote lecture at the 7th Nordic Music Therapy Congress. The theme of the conference is “Music therapy models, methods and techniques “. Karette’s lecture about the RHYME project was named “Musical furniture? Health and therapy potentials playing on and with smart things”. Further, Birgitta Cappelen and Anders-Petter Andersson arranged a workshop during the conference with the title “Design of Musicking Interactive Things”.

The conference was held in Jyväskylä in Finland from 13 to 17 of June in 2012.