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A multi-week study of musicians living with an intelligent instrument

What happens when musicians take an intelligent instrument home and live with it for several weeks?

Level: Honours, Masters
Prerequisites: HCI experience (e.g., COMP3900/COMP6390) and interest in qualitative research methods. Musical experience is essential.

Previous lab studies of IMPSY lasted under an hour, which wasn’t long enough for musicians to build up a useful dataset. This project runs a longitudinal study: a small group of musicians take an IMPSY instrument home for several weeks, play it, collect data, retrain their model, and reflect on the experience.

You’ll recruit participants, run onboarding sessions, collect diaries, interaction logs, and interviews, and measure creative experience with the Creativity Support Index at the start and end of the study. Human ethics approval for this study already exists, and you’ll be added to the protocol at the start of your project so you can begin recruiting early.

• Minimum: 5 participants over a 4-week field period; thematic analysis of diaries and interviews.
• Stretch: up to 8 participants or a longer field period; analysis that links what participants say to changes in their logs and models.

Instruments and a retraining procedure are provided by the lab. If new update methods from the project above are ready, the study can use them; otherwise, models are retrained from scratch, which already works.

Tags: #HCI #user-study #longitudinal #music #IMPSY

How to apply

Contact Charles Martin with your CV, your unofficial transcript (if you are an ANU student), and a brief statement (200 words) explaining how you would approach this project. Before applying, read the Join page and our project expectations.