My master's thesis (managed by Julien Castet, Myriam Desainte-Catherine and Martin Hachet) led to the definition of a novel interaction paradigm. Improvised interfaces are tangible interfaces made out of found objects and tailored by their users without former preparation. We explored how they could benefit to the specific case of musical performance (although it is a more general concept).

With such an interface, the most boring workspace workspace suddenly turns into a huge music lab. Take, say, a pad of post-it notes, and turn it into a shaker. Move toward your nearest collaborator with a dubious smile. With one hand, start playing the post-it-shaker, and with the other, set up his coffee cup to start playing a drum and bass loop at each of his sips. Start singing and dance to the beat until he figures out you made a musical instrument out of him !

I am currently thinking about an easy to use public prototype of a real-time modular improvised musical interface based on the one described in my thesis.

Resources

  • Master's thesis PDF BibTeX
  • Thesis defense slides (in French) PDF
  • Video (in French) M4V