Mobile Group Music Improvisation

Collaborative improvisation, composition, and performance of music constitute a basic and distinctive form of human interaction. Across cultures, the production and enjoyment of music is typically an open, collaborative, activity more analogous to informal conversation or story telling than to a formal lecture. We know very little about how to design for such situations even though we have seen a blossoming in the range of mobile interactive devices. In this paper we present a design for a remote group music improvisation environment and a evaluation framework based on psychoanalytic theories of attunement between mother and baby in early development. The applicability of such evaluation to joint creative play in adults is demonstrated through observation of the use and development of the remote group music improvisation environment using mobile tablets