RHYME contributed with both a talk/presentation and exhibited Polly World at The Research Council of Norway’s stand in the exhibition hall. RHYME member Anders-Petter Andersson and Fredrik Olofsson demonstrated Polly Ocean, Polly Planet and Polly Fire and the Polly Compose App at the stand.

RHYME member Birgitta Cappelen presented her talk with the title “Vitalizing Welfare Technology – a new paradigm in health technology” during Session B2: Design for Healthcare on the 15th November.
In the abstract she wrote: “Welfare technology often focus on diagnosis, biomedical data and medicine. But health promotion is also about vitality, communication and participation. In The Research Council of Norway financed project, RHYME, we have developed several generations of social, mobile and multi-medial health promoting technologies. These technologies offer new embodied, sensorial, musical and distributed experiences and ways to evoke vitality, co-creation, and strengthen one’s own resources and relations.”

Download the RHYME brochure here

Photo: J. Fagerlönn

RHYME member Anders-Petter Andersson won best paper presentation when he presented Birgitta Cappelen and his paper on AudioMostly2016 the 6th October 2016.  The motivation the committee gave was: “A very pedagogical, well-designed and passionate presentation with humorous and daring elements”

The paper is called ‘Health Improving Multi-Sensorial and Musical Environments’ and, “focus on the designed qualities of the Polly World environment, and specifically on the multi-sensorial and musical interaction design”. In the paper they present how they have designed the interactive music and multi-sensorial qualities of the environment, to make them health promoting, by combining knowledge from the field of interactive Music composition, Interaction Design and Tangible Interaction with knowledge from therapeutic disciplines such as Music and Health, Music Therapy and Sensory Integration. One of the main findings is the positive results moving from Multi-Sensory feedback, focusing on auditive, tactile, visual modalities, to Multi-Sensorial, motivating mastering over time, creating expectations, building on rhythmic, narrative, musical, relational and cultural.

RHYME members Anders-Petter Andersson and Birgitta Cappelen were invited to contribute with lecture and Polly World Workshop at the SPEDUTEC meeting in Goethenburg from November 2nd to 4th.

“SPEDUTEC is a project supported by the Nordplus Horizontal Programme under the Nordic Council of Ministers. The aim is to increase understanding on theory and pedagogical and technological practice on learning through assistive technologies (ATs) in multisensory environments. Furthermore, our goal is to build a new Nordic-Baltic network on the topic. The main working methods is sharing knowledge and experiences, and mutual learning.”

Birgitta and Anders-Petters lecture was called  “5 Generations of RHYME tangibles” and described the RHYME project through 4 generation of observations and development and the current 5 Generation platform used in the Vitalising Welfare Technology course at AHO in October 2015.

At 18.00 on Tuesday April 14th is the opening of the first public exhibition of Polly World at Kunst og Designhall HiOA (old Art Academy in St. Olavgate 32).  Polly World will also be open for visitors from 16.00 to 19.00 on Wednesday April 15, Thursday April 16 and Friday April as part of the conference “Aesthetics and Children with Special Needs“.

During the conference both RHYME member Karette Stænseth, Anders-Petter Anderssson and Birgitta Cappelen will make presentations/talks about different perspectives on RHYME, related to the conference theme.

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

RHYME contributed with two keynote lectures at the 10th Nordic Snoezelen Conference 2014 in Helsingør. The two lectures were Birgitta Cappelen’s Designing Next Generation Interactive MSE and Anders-Petter Andersson’s lecture Music in RHYME.
In Birgitta’s lecture she argued based on a democratic and humanistic perspectives and a resource oriented approach for a design of Multi Sensory Environments  (MSE) that offers continuous positive experiences and challenging mastery curve for diverse users. This demands a design that is both sensorially stimulating and easy in use and complex at the same time. This demands a computational and software solution that offers many ways to interact and develop actability and mastery over time, not only simple switch solutions.

In Anders-Petter’s lecture Music in RHYME he explained how the musical simplicity and complexity is built up, based on musical sounds and programmed rules that are activated in different user-situations.

The Nordic Snoezelen (also called Multi-sensory Environment – MSE) Conference is a biannual conference and the most important community in the Nordic Countries for use of sensory stimulation in therapy and health promotion.
The Norwegian Community is called Norske Sanserom, the American Community is called AAMSE and the international organisation ISNA. Within MSE very little has been done regarding use of advanced computational possibilities, interactive music and professional design and aesthetic competence when creating the Multi-Sensory Environments. In this context  RHYME is a unique project internationally. If you  want to read more about MSE research you will find a list here.