Designing four generations of ‘Musicking Tangibles’

Abstract

This article, which builds on several conference papers, describes what we call ‘Musicking Tangibles’, a novel approach towards understanding and design of interactive music technology for people with special needs. The health values of music are well documented, but so far little research on interactive music technology has been developed for music therapy and health improvement in everyday situations. In our opinion, the music technology that has been used exploits little of the potential that current computer technology has to offer these fields because it is designed and used within a narrow perspective on technology and its potential. With our long experience from design and development of interactive music technology, especially from the interdisciplinary research project RHYME (rhyme.no), we present and argue for a broader understanding of music technology for empowerment and health improvement, building on a multidisciplinary approach with perspectives from tangible interaction design and inspiration from resource oriented music therapy and empowerment thinking. We hereby suggest the notion, Musicking Tangibles, inspired by Christopher Small’s (1998) term ‘musicking’, as a label for our understanding. Based on our experiences and user observations from the RHYME project we argue that the Musicking Tangibles have unique empowering qualities with health potentials.