Engaging with Music and Technology

Abstract: Is music dead? Whilst figures in the commercial music industry bemoan the loss of sense of purpose in contemporary music and the role of the Internet in sidelining music as a political force, I contend that new technologies hold the key to reinvigorating music’s social role. In this talk I suggest that mutual engagement is key to creating new forms of multi-user social music systems which will capture the public’s heart and imagination. I propose a number of design features which support mutual engagement, and a set of techniques for evaluating mutual engagement by examining the minutiae of inter-person communication. We suggest how these techniques could be used in empirical studies, and how they might inform artistic practice to design and evaluate new forms of collaborative music making.

Bio: Bryan-Kinns is a Reader in Interaction Design and Deputy Dean for Science and Engineering at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and leads Interactional Sound and Music in the Centre for Digital Music. Bryan-Kinns has published award winning international journal and conference papers on his funded research on mutual engagement, cross-modal interaction, and tangible interfaces. His research is reported in publications such as the New Scientist, and media outlets such as BBC, and exhibited at venues such as the Science Museum, London. Bryan-Kinns holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Secondment in recognition of his work on commercialising academic research. He was a panel member for the National Science Foundation’s CreativeIT funding panel, and provided expert consultation for the European Commission’s funding of Creativity and ICT. He chairs the ACM Creativity, Cognition and Art Community, was involved in two research networks focusing on the art-computer cross-over and future design, chaired the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Creativity and Cognition conference 2010, and co-chaired the British Computer Society (BCS) international HCI conference 2006. Dr. Bryan-Kinns is a recipient of the ACM Recognition of Service Award, and BCS Recognition of Ten years service. In 1998 he was awarded a Ph.D. in Human Computer Interaction from the University of London.