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- Member of: ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Description
Achievement of many long-term goals requires sustained practice over long durations. Examples include goals related to areas of high personal and societal benefit, such as physical fitness, which requires a practice of frequent exercise; self-education, which requires a practice of frequent study; or personal productivity, which requires a practice of performing work. Maintaining these practices can be difficult, because even though obvious benefits come with achieving these goals, an individual's willpower may not always be sufficient to sustain the required effort. This dissertation advocates addressing this problem by designing novel interfaces that provide people with new practices that are fun and enjoyable, thereby reducing the need for users to draw upon willpower when pursuing these long-term goals. To draw volitional usage, these practice-oriented interfaces can integrate key characteristics of existing activities, such as music-making and other hobbies, that are already known to draw voluntary participation over long durations. This dissertation makes several key contributions to provide designers with the necessary tools to create practice-oriented interfaces. First, it consolidates and synthesizes key ideas from fields such as activity theory, self-determination theory, HCI design, and serious leisure. It also provides a new conceptual framework consisting of heuristics for designing systems that draw new users, plus heuristics for making systems that will continue drawing usage from existing users over time. These heuristics serve as a collection of useful ideas to consider when analyzing or designing systems, and this dissertation postulates that if designers build these characteristics into their products, the resulting systems will draw more volitional usage. To demonstrate the framework's usefulness as an analytical tool, it is applied as a set of analytical lenses upon three previously-existing experiential media systems. To demonstrate its usefulness as a design tool, the framework is used as a guide in the development of an experiential media system called pdMusic. This system is installed at public events for user studies, and the study results provide qualitative support for many framework heuristics. Lastly, this dissertation makes recommendations to scholars and designers on potential future ways to examine the topic of volitional usage.
ContributorsWallis, Isaac (Author) / Ingalls, Todd (Thesis advisor) / Coleman, Grisha (Committee member) / Sundaram, Hari (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
I am interested in performance that includes multiple artistic media. I am looking for a way to communicate with other artists that can clearly express the meaning of an artistic gesture that they can interpret for their medium. I wish to make transmedia performance art with a meaning that is clear to an audience. That meaning can be abstract. Sometimes we call art "abstract" to imply that it has no perceivable meaning. However, everything has meaning. Even if a piece of art does not have narrative meaning, we can still perceive a structure. That is thanks to our imagination. Imagination is our way of making sense of our experience. I believe that if I can identify some of the imaginative structures through which I perceive and understand my own work, I can use those structures to annotate or organize scores for improvised performance pieces. I am interested in how we understand art. One theory of understanding, which comes from Mark Johnson, involves "image schemata." Image schemata (sing. schema) are basic, abstract structures that we develop based on what we perceive from our physical interactions with the environment. We project these structures that come from a physical domain onto the mental domain. Johnson calls this process "metaphorical projection," and he calls our ability to do this "imagination." By metaphorically projecting image schemata from one domain to another, we form meaning of our experiences, and thus contribute to our understanding of the world. I believe that I can use image schemata to explain the meanings inherent in the art I make and to explain the connections in meaning between one artistic medium to another. I wish to apply this in a transmedia performance setting. First, I will analyze previous transmedia works in terms of image schemata. Second, I will make a score using image schemata for an improvised performance. Third, I will reflect on the results of attempting to rehearse that score.
ContributorsLevy, Luis Alejandro (Author) / Hackbarth, Glenn (Committee member) / Ingalls, Todd (Committee member) / Ziegler, Christian (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Beneath the epidermis, the human body contains a vibrant and complex ecology of interwoven rhythms such the heartbeat, the breath, the division of cells, and complex brain activity. By repurposing emergent medical technology into real-time gestural sound controllers of electronic musical instruments, experimental musicians in the 1960s and 1970s – including David Rosenboom – began to realize the expressive potential of these biological sounds. Composers experimented with breath and heartbeat. They also used electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, which register various types of brain waves. Instead of using the sound of brain waves in fixed-media pieces, many composers took diverse approaches to the challenge of presenting this in live performance. Their performance practices suggest different notions of embodiment, a relationship in this music which has not been discussed in detail.
Rosenboom reflects extensively on this performance practice. He supports his EEG research with theory about the practice of biofeedback. Rosenboom’s work with EEG sensors spans several decades and continue today, which has allowed him to make use of advancing sensing and computing technologies. For instance, in his 1976 On Being Invisible, the culmination of his work with EEG, he makes use of analyzed EEG data to drive a co-improvising musical system.
In this thesis, I parse different notions of embodiment in the performance of EEG music. Through a critical analysis of examples from the discourse surrounding EEG music in its early years, I show that cultural perception of EEG sonification points to imaginative speculations about the practice’s potentials; these fantasies have fascinating ramifications on the role of the body in this music’s performance. Juxtaposing these with Rosenboom, I contend that he cultivated an embodied performance practice of the EEG. To show how this might be manifest in performance, I consider two recordings of On Being Invisible.
As few musicologists have investigated this particular strain of musical experimentalism, I hope to contextualize biofeedback musicianship by offering an embodied reading of this milestone work for EEG.
Rosenboom reflects extensively on this performance practice. He supports his EEG research with theory about the practice of biofeedback. Rosenboom’s work with EEG sensors spans several decades and continue today, which has allowed him to make use of advancing sensing and computing technologies. For instance, in his 1976 On Being Invisible, the culmination of his work with EEG, he makes use of analyzed EEG data to drive a co-improvising musical system.
In this thesis, I parse different notions of embodiment in the performance of EEG music. Through a critical analysis of examples from the discourse surrounding EEG music in its early years, I show that cultural perception of EEG sonification points to imaginative speculations about the practice’s potentials; these fantasies have fascinating ramifications on the role of the body in this music’s performance. Juxtaposing these with Rosenboom, I contend that he cultivated an embodied performance practice of the EEG. To show how this might be manifest in performance, I consider two recordings of On Being Invisible.
As few musicologists have investigated this particular strain of musical experimentalism, I hope to contextualize biofeedback musicianship by offering an embodied reading of this milestone work for EEG.
ContributorsJohnson, Garrett Laroy (Author) / Xin Wei, Sha (Thesis advisor) / Ingalls, Todd (Committee member) / Suzuki, Kotoka (Committee member) / Tobias, Evan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015