Collaborative Instruments for Older Adults

Collaborative of music making is an important part of socialization and can be a great way for people to share social experiences and bond. They can also be a way for people to learn about new ways of music making and new kinds of musical aesthetics and share different contexts.

One current research focus is on experiences for adults facing cognitive decline, both in terms of giving them sensory experiences, as well as providing bonding and socialization opportunities for them in intergenerational contexts.

Design Principles

What kind of instruments will help facilitate these kind of experience experiences? Here is a first set of design designed principles to consider this context.

1. Context

• Primary audience: Intergenerational audiences, from young children to older adults with cognitive difficulties.
• Design priorities:
  • Simplicity — minimal, intuitive interaction.
  • Immediate feedback — clear cause and effect for every action.
  • Responsiveness over style — musical outcomes should feel alive, not necessarily stylistically correct.
• Alternate audiences: Musicians or those with digital music experience (DAWs, sequencers), considered secondary for now.

---

2. Learning Process

• Interface scale
  • Target surface size: ≈10 × 15 cm (4 × 6 in).
  • Designed for touch interaction
  • Current prototypes will be designed for laptops, but keep in mind the touch screen goal.
• Accessibility
• Understandable to users with no prior musical experience.
• A mid term goal is allowing gradual increases in musical or control complexity.
• Onboarding
  • How can we create short tutorial, video, or demonstration to introduce the instrument?
  • Format and effectiveness of onboarding remain an open research question.
• Affordances
  • Controls should be clearly labeled and meaningfully named.
  • Interactions should be satisfying, direct, and generative with minimal effort.
  • Visual and audible feedback should be temporally linked with interaction
  • Value indication through visual position or motion, not numbers.
    • No dead zones — every control movement should have a meaningful sonic effect.
  • State management
    • No state saving by the user.
    • Predefined states/presets (e.g., musical sequences or sound settings) may be designed with the instrument, and recalled.

---

3. Interaction Process

Interaction Models

• One-player-one-voice
  Each participant controls their own full musical output — similar to a member of a string quartet.
• Shared parameter control
  Multiple participants influence a single shared instrument
  • agency clarity (“who controls what”) is a key research question.
• Distributed parameter control
  Participants control distinct subsections of a shared parameter space (e.g., one person adjusts timbre, another sequencer settings).
• Isometric control
  Participants use identical control sets that act on different but equivalent regions of a parameter space (e.g., each person controls half of a sequence; combined output is the series concatenation of both halves).

---

4. Aesthetic Output

• Structure of experience
  • Each interaction might have a clear beginning and end, providing a sense of completion.
  • Or a free play mode may be provided - allowing for exploration
    • How to create structure within free play?
• Visual design
  • Color palette, iconography, and layout influence how welcoming and playable the interface feels.
  • Control size and orientation can convey structure or invite play.
  • Nonstandard layouts can foster exploration and discourage DAW-like expectations.
• Sound design
  • Explore whether acoustic references or electronic timbres are more approachable.
    • Acoustic sounds might be familiar, but also create stylistic/sonic expecations
    • Electronic sounds might suggest exploration / experimentation
  • Consider genre associations that may attract or exclude participants.
  • How do we prioritize melody and rhythm or sequence and timbre spaces.
    • Are there musical materials precomposed?
    • What are the performers focusing on?

Bibliography

1. Favilla, Stu, and Sonja Pedell. “Touch Screen Collaborative Music: Designing NIME for Older People with Dementia.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. Zenodo, June 1, 2014. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1178760.
2. Blaine, Tina, and Sidney Fels. “Contexts of Collaborative Musical Experiences.” Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (Montreal, Canada), 2003, 129–34.
3. Pigrem, Jon, Justin Christensen, Andrew MacPherson, Renee Timmers, Luc de Witte, and Jennifer MacRitchie. Agency and Creativity in Musical Interaction for Those Living with Dementia and Cognitive Decline. 2024.
4. Frid, Emma. “Accessible Digital Musical Instruments—A Review of Musical Interfaces in Inclusive Music Practice.” Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 3, no. 3 (2019): 57. https://doi.org/10.3390/mti3030057.