Soundscape projectThe Soundscape project is exploring HCI and CSCW within the context of creative practice in both composition and performance.

Taking an ecological perspective, it is exploring the relationships and interdependencies that arise between composers, musicians, audience and instruments with the view to identifying what becomes important when designing and developing digital musical instruments. It is a collaboration involving the UQ schools of ITEE and Music.

Soundscape is a New Digital Musical Instrument that allows the digital musician to manipulate and improvise music sources while allowing them to communicate expression through sound and visuals. The digital musicians manipulate the music by their gestures of pressing, swiping and poking four stretch fabric panels. Graphics, projected onto the back of the surface, are responsive to both touch interaction and the sounds that are the result of the interactions. Interactions allow the musician to change effects and vary the loops of the backing music and improvise new music over the background.

SoundScape 2017

Publications

  • Worthy, Peter, Hunter, Trevor, Matthews, Ben and Viller, Stephen (2020). Musical agency and an ecological perspective of DMIs: collective embodiment in third wave HCI. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. doi: 10.1007/s00779-020-01429-9 View PDF 
  • Hunter, Trevor, Worthy, Peter, Matthews, Ben and Viller, Stephen (2019). Soundscape : Participatory design of an interface for musical expression. 14th International Audio Mostly Conference: A Journey in Sound on ZZZ, Nottingham, United Kingdom, September 18 - 20, 2019. New York, NY, United States: ACM Press. doi: 10.1145/3356590.3356640 View PDF 
  • Hunter, Trevor, Worthy, Peter, Matthews, Ben, and Viller, Stephen (2019). Using participatory design in the development of a new musical interface : Understanding musician's needs beyond usability. 14th International Audio Mostly Conference: A Journey in Sound on ZZZ, Nottingham, United Kingdom, September 18 - 20, 2019. New York, NY, United States: ACM Press. View PDF 
  • Hunter, Trevor, Balachandran, Shiva, Worthy, Peter, Matthews, Ben and Viller, Stephen (2017). Soundscape: building connection between digital musicians and their audience. 29th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference, OzCHI 2017, Brisbane, QLD Australia, 28 November-1 December 2017. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3152771.3156176. View PDF

Get in touch

For more information about this project, please get in touch:

Trevor Hunter 
e: trevor.hunter@uq.edu.au 

Project members

Research Scholars

Mr Trevor Hunter

Academic and Research Staff

Dr Eve Klein, UQ School of Music

Dr Peter Worthy

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Lecturer in Human-Centred Computing
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Associate Professor Ben Matthews

Associate Professor
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Associate Professor Stephen Viller

Discipline Leader Human Centred Computing & Associate Professor
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science