Anchoring In Ubiquitous Musical Activities

Prevalent music techniques are not well suited to music making in ubiquitous contexts. How are musicians and system designers supposed to find their way through the myriad of locations, devices, and materials involved in ubiquitous music interventions? This study suggests that we may get some insights into the mechanics of ubiquitous music making by looking at the intersection between tools, concepts and activities. We discuss affordances as dynamic properties emergent from agent-object (natural affordances) and agent-agent interactions (social affordances). And introduce anchoring as a conceptual tool to explain how affordances are shaped. Then we apply anchoring in the development of a sound-based interaction metaphor time tagging. We report the implementation of a prototype – mixDroid – and a usability test involving the realization of a musical work.

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