I'm Lia Mice. This video is about a CHI 2022 paper on
research I conducted with Andrew McPherson at Queen Mary
University of London. The paper is called Super Size Me:
Interface Size, Identity and Embodiment in Digital Musical
Instrument Design. If you'd like more details about the research,
you can find it in the paper. Digital interfaces are
shrinking. This trend is driven by pressures of mass production
and consumer culture, and often accompanied by discourse of
control, precision, or convenience. But human bodies
remain the same size. We are interested in the impact of
interface size on the co-construction of humans and
technology. This idea that humans and technologies are
ontologically inseparable forms the basis of Entanglement
Theories of HCI. As Frauenberger says, "the extent to which
digital technologies shape who we are means that whoever shapes
technology puts the chisel on humanity". And as Homewood puts
it, "when we design for or with bodies, we actually design
bodies themselves". These ideas challenge the independent
existence of a body and an interface, arguing that the body
is always more-than-human. They decentre the human and recognize
the agency of objects and also of political and sociocultural
systems. So our research explores how changing the size
of an interface has implications on the formation of user
identities. To research this, we designed an oversized digital
musical instrument and invited musicians to use the instrument
to create original performances. We found that the large size of
the instrument influenced the performances, and also the
musicians' self-perception. This research shines new light on the
ways in which designing technology is designing humans,
and in turn culture. The study instrument is two meters tall
and two meters wide, with 20 performable pendulums. Striking
the instrument creates a staccato. Tilting a pendulum
creates a drone. The timbre of the drone changes in
correspondence to the tilt of the pendulum. Tilting a pendulum
above 45 degrees produces an unstable system where the drone
becomes chaotic and distorted. An open call for musicians was
circulated on social media, and regardless of their musical
backgrounds, all musicians that responded were accepted. Each
musician completed three sessions where they had private
access to the instrument for 1 hour. Half the musicians
received layout A, in which the lower register tones are located
on the lower tier, and the higher register tones are
located on the upper tier. And half the musicians received
layout B, in which the lower register tones are located on
the left side of the instrument and the higher register tones
are located on the right side of the instrument. They were
instructed to complete several compositions in response to
various creative prompts. The final prompt was to create a 3
minute performance that was broadcast on an online concert.
Each session concluded with a semi-structured interview, which
was transcribed and analyzed using thematic analysis. Of the
10 musicians in the study, 3 were women, 4 were men and 3
were gender-fluid. Their ages ranged from 25 to 54. Their
heights ranged from 157 centimeters to 186 centimeters.
And while they all identified as able bodied, seven disclosed
conditions that may impact performance of the instrument
such as injuries, anxiety, dyspraxia, and hyperventilation
syndrome. All the musicians completed all sessions and
created a 3 minute composition for the concert. Here are some
examples of the performances. 73% of all compositions created
during the study featured only tones within the width of 5
pendulums. 88% of all compositions in the study
featured tones located in both the upper and lower tiers, but
only 27% of tones in the compositions were located on the
upper tier. This is interesting because on layout A, the upper
and lower tiers are different registers, whereas on layout B,
they're adjacent tones. This trend emerged in all musicians
regardless of which instrument tonal layout they were assigned.
This indicates that the extra physical effort required to
raise the arms to perform the pendulums located on the upper
tier resulted in participants performing fewer tones located
in the upper tier. To understand how the study instrument might
form part of a more-than-human entanglement, it's perhaps more
productive to consider the instruments that each
participant usually plays. For example, a cello player said
that the music he composed for the study instrument was
inspired by the way he plays the cello. And a synth player said
her concert performance was similar to the compositions
she's made with synthesizers. We might say that the participants
in the study instrument are entangled into a more-than-human
assemblage, but we found it more interesting to focus on what has
been removed from such an entanglement: the cello or the
synthesizer. After many years of performing with a particular
instrument, removing it leaves a particularly shaped hole in a
performer's (more-than-human) body. Our study instrument
partially fills that hole, as seen by repertoire that bore the
resemblance of the participants' primary instruments and musical
styles. When examining the performances, we found examples
of how embodied interaction created the codependency between
the instrument and the performance. The size of the
instrument and the effort required to perform it resulted
in specific performative and compositional choices.
Performers largely narrowed their performances to tones that
are located in front of their bodies, prioritizing tones that
were comfortable to reach over melodic or harmonic
considerations. The compositions are mostly performed by a
musician standing still, with musical pauses to accommodate
the musician relocating their body to another part of the
instrument. We found it interesting that only 1
participant suggested rearranging the tones of the
instrument or lowering the height of the instrument to
better suit his body, whereas 3 participants made comments about
changing their bodies to better suit the instrument size. In
commercial practice, the economic reasons for favouring
small interfaces are obvious, but we argue that HCI research
doesn't need to adopt a fixation with miniaturized technologies.
There's a whole constellation of entanglements to explore. Our
results highlight the complex entanglement of bodies,
instruments, social and cultural contexts, which are present in
musical performance. And we show how exploring musical
performance with an oversized instrument can perturb this
entanglement in sometimes idiosyncratic ways. In an era
when companies miniaturize synthesizers and drum machines
to cater for the bedroom electronic music producer, there
are no digital musical instruments on the market that
are as large as the instrument used as a probe in this study.
By highlighting the distinctive patterns of interaction at large
dimensions, this research provides a critical perspective
on existing music technologies and a resource for understanding
the design trade offs in other areas of experience-oriented
HCI. Thanks for watching.