The Music Table

Jeppe Schmidt Nielsen

Stud.it. at Aarhus University, Denmark
jeppe2002@gmail.com
Asbjrn Lodahl Christensen
Stud.it. at Aarhus University, Denmark
asselc7@gmail.com
November 2014

ABSTRACT
This paper presents a design prototype for
electronic musicians who do jam sessions. A jam
session in electronic music environments is highly
complex due to the fact that they are not able to
express their feelings and creativity in the same
way as acoustic and instrumental musicians.
Usually the electronic musicians are bound to an
individual computer screen, and we want to
change this to the sake of making the electronic
jam session more creative and cooperative. In
addition to this, the paper gives a presentation of
our design project; The Music Table and presents
several key findings, which have been found
through qualitative researches. The article also
brings a discussion of the dynamic process of a
jam session, whether we actually create a design
with The Music Table that sustain and even
improve the dynamic and creative processes of a
jam session or if The Music Table in fact destroys
these elements completely in a jam session.
KEYWORDS
Blended
Interaction,
Computer-supported
cooperative work, creativity & constraints,
interactive music table, shared view, electronic
music, jam session.
INTRODUCTION
This paper works within the field of electronic
musicians and how to make an electronic jam
session more cooperative and creative. Through
gathering of different qualitative data, including
interviews and workshops, we discovered an
interesting problem in the field of electronic jams
because they are quite static and more importantly
they do not advance a cooperative work practice.
This is due to the individual screen that the
electronic musicians posses and in the lack of the
shared view the electronic musicians need the
following things in their electronic jam session;

visibility, control and communication. In the

absence of the above-mentioned we have
developed an interactive Music Table that makes
it possible for electronic musicians to have a more
creative jam session. The basic idea of The Music
Table is that you have a table that connects with
quadratic blocks, each containing a specific
sample made in the music production software,
Ableton. When these blocks interact with the table
the specific sample is then played loud and that is
why The Music Table is an advantage for multiple
users since the users are able to apply and remove
these blocks together during a jam session.
In this academic paper we will also be
investigating some related work to The Music
Table, including an Italian research project called
The Music Room and the WILD Room. To get an
understanding of the domain of jam sessions we
will also outline what creates a creative jam
session. Furthermore we will summarize our
methods and experiments throughout the paper to
get an understanding of our final results.

RELATED WORK
The Music Table spans through several research
areas in the field of interaction design, mostly our
related work to this design project is connected to

the term of blended interaction, studies of

creativity and also to the domain of jam sessions
to get an understanding of the psychological and
social aspects of jam sessions.
There is a related work to ours called The Music
Room where people with little or no experience at
all with playing music is able to compose a
melody through dance moves and other body
expressions. The idea of the concept is basically
that music contains several emotions. The room
itself becomes the interactive composing element
wherein the couples have to dance and express
their feelings in order to create creative music.
There is a similarity between this Music Room
and our Music Table and that is the principle that
it is important to see how your opponent is
expressing his or her feelings in a specific musical
situation and in our case jam sessions [1]. We find
this mentioned article interesting because it
illustrates the need for expressing emotions and
science of gestures during the creation of music.
This is to some extent not possible at the current
practice of electronic jam sessions because the
musicians are bound to their computer screens and
do not have a shared view.
This leads us to the perspective of a jam session
where the Portuguese researcher Ricardo Nuno
Futre Pinheiro in his research paper The creative
process in the context of jazz jam session
examines the dynamics and creativity of jam
sessions in the musical genre of jazz. He
concludes that there are several elements that are
important for being creative during jam sessions,
including the physical space, the interaction
between the musicians, interaction between the
musicians and the audience and musical
competence. Basically the creative process during
a jam session happens due to the multiple factors
listed above and furthermore Pinheiro points out
that it is the conversation and the interaction
between the musicians and audience that creates
that special creative jam session [2].
Other fields of interest to our design project are
the research field of blended interaction and
creativity constraints. The blended interaction is
explained briefly with mixing environments and
artefacts from the physical world with the digital
world and by that creating a space that is more
easy to comprehend and control digitally [3].

Something we make use of to do better interaction

design and improve the cooperative mechanisms
of The Music Table. Design projects within the
field of blended interaction includes the WILD
Room, which is a project involving multiple
screens that allow distributed cooperative work
[4], and InfoTable where users are allowed to
share digital information among their computers
to an interactive table [5]. We are also highly
interested in how we can increase the creativity
among the musicians during a jam session in our
design project and that is also why we have been
looking at creativity constraints in other research
projects. The presumption according to the
following researchers Biskjaer, Dalsgaard and
Halskov in the field of creativity constraints is that
by giving constraints to practitioners of a certain
field will make them able to be more creative in
some cases [6].
The Music Table builds upon some of these
mentioned projects and will be explained more
deeply later in this article.
METHODS
We have discovered a need among electronic
musicians to improve their creative work practices
during a jam session based on qualitative studies.
Our qualitative study is based on the electronic
band FABL and their creative work practices. In
addition to this, we conducted qualitative research
outside the domain of "electronic musicians" to
strengthen the validity of our collected empirical
material. Our qualitative process was as follows:
We started with a semi-structured interview,
where we gathered knowledge of the domain. On
the basis of the acquired knowledge, we analyzed
a number of interesting aspects, including in
particular the need to improve the creative work
practices during jam sessions. We made an
Inspiration Card Workshop with the electronic
band FABL to prove specific points that turned up
in our qualitative studies and to get a better
knowledge of the specific domain. See the picture
below.

control and communication. This is due to the fact

that they have individually workspace from which
they find it difficult to interact with the other band
members. Below you can read two quotes from
the first interview with FABL that underpin our
key findings:
Jonas Kristensen: "It has a tendency to become
messy because Jeppe and I are both playing a
bass role because we each have an idea... We
need to free ourselves from our computer and not
just sample it right away.. "

To understand the creative work practices during

jam sessions better, we made the decision to look
outside of the domain of electronic musicians and
make an interview with four non-electronic
musicians.
Based on the three described iterations, the two
interviews and the Inspiration Card Workshop, we
decided to create a prototype. The prototype was
coded in Processing and subsequently extended
and tested by the interaction table in CAVI. See
picture below:

Aki Shirashi Bech: "That bass is not very cool, if

you communicate with a wireless headset or
something like that ... There is going to be a more
cool communication along the way.
One of the two ideas from the Inspiration Card
Workshop with FABL confirmed our key
findings, see the picture below:

Research in blended interaction, including The

WILD Room and InfoTable, have previously
shown an advantage in creating a shared view in
cooperative situations in order to improve
participants'
visibility,
control
and
communication.

This was recorded on video, which we used to

create a proof of concept. FABL and master
students in a design course at Aarhus University
later evaluated our Proof of Concept.

Based on the above research and our key findings

we have chosen to build our prototype with a
shared view, see below:

RESULTS
Based on our collected empirical data with FABL
we deduced the following key findings that
electronic musicians in jam sessions are missing
cooperation opportunities, including visibility,

The prototype The Music Table gives electronic

musicians a shared view from where they are able
to control and communicate which melodies and
rhythms that should be played in their jam session
by moving the blocks in and out of the table.
Based on the related work, we assume that the
shared view results in a better view because the
melodies and the rhythms are presented as a
physical artifact on the table instead of a digital
artifact on a computer screen. This representation
makes it clear that they are part of the jam [3].
According to the article written by Pinheiro [2]
and our own research the dynamic process in a
jam session is highly important. To underline this
dynamic process, see the following quote:
Benjamin Legarth If I can see that Martin goes
up on the hi-hat I can express something that
corresponds to that of my guitar.
Based on this, we are able to conclude that live
synchronization between Ableton and the blocks
are necessary because it ensures the dynamic
process. Based on creativity research [6] we have
incorporated randomly generated constraints to
facilitate a dynamic process and increase the
creativity of the musician.
DISCUSSION
In an attempt to improve FABL's creative work
practices during jam sessions we have collected
knowledge from other researches in Blended
Interaction, including Wild Room. It is worth to
mention that this knowledge is confined within
their work context and thus not generally
applicable. We have therefore reframed the design
conditions through our research whereby new
interesting perspectives have been produced.
Notable within our domain is the need to maintain
and if possible improve the dynamic process,
which both electronic and non-electronic
musicians find essential for a jam session. This
has challenged The Music Table, because it
prolongs the way from thought to action, which
both electronic and non-electronic musicians refer
to as an inhibitory effect to the dynamic process.
The question is, on the other hand, whether the
enhanced cooperation opportunities, including
visibility, control and communication outweighs
this. Our future work of this study will include
additional user tests and even some modifications

of The Music Table to get the most out of the

design.
CONCLUSION
In this article we have presented the jam session
among electronic musicians as highly complex
due to the fact of their individual view when
composing electronic music. Based on this we
have discovered a need among electronic
musicians to improve their work practice during
jam sessions making it more creative and
cooperative. In relation to this have we have
deduced our key findings through qualitative
researches to the following; visibility, control and
communication which are also the foundation of
The Music Table.
Based on our own research and the related work
presented in this article, we assume that The
Music Table is able to improve the creative and
dynamic work practice in jam sessions of
electronic musicians. We would like to underline
that the above-mentioned is an assumption, which
we intend to test in order to confirm our
assumption.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We would like to thank the electronic band FABL
and the respective band members including: Jonas
Kristensen & Aki Shiraishi Bech. Furthermore we
would like to thank Benjamin Legarth, Andreas
Christensen, Casper Mortensen & Martin
Isbrandt. We also thank PhD Peter Dalsgaard for
great discussions and perspectives to our design
project.
REFERENCES
1: Fabio Morreale, Antonella De Angeli, Raul
Masu, Paolo Roa and Nicola Conci. Collaborative
creativity: The Music Room. Springer, p. 11871199, 16. October 2013.
2: Ricardo Nuno Futre Pinheiro. The creative
process in the context of jazz jam sessions.
Academic Journals, p. 1-5, January 2011.
3: Hans-Christian Jetter, Harald Reiterer and
Florian
Geyer.
Blended
Interaction:
understanding
natural
humancomputer
interaction in post-WIMP interactive spaces.

Springer-Verlag London, p. 1139 1158, 18

October 2013.
4: Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Stphane Huot,
Mathieu Nancel,
Wendy Mackay, Emmanuel Pietriga, Romain
Primet, Julie Wagner, Olivier Chapuis, Clment
Pillias, James R. Eagan, Tony Gjerlufsen and
Clemens Klokmose. Multisurface Interaction in
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6: Michael Mose Biskjaer, Peter Dalsgaard and
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