Ecologically grounded creative practice: Strategies for support of audience participation

Damián Keller – [email protected]
  Núcleo Amazônico de Pesquisa Musical, UFAC/IFAC

Luzilei Aliel – [email protected]
  University of São Paulo

Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa – [email protected]
  University of São Paulo

Introduction

One of the key aspects of the creative process involves the choice and/or development of technological support. This entails finding out how material, cognitive and social factors influence the strategies applied in decision-making. Our proposal is to expand the support of creative practice in everyday contexts. More specifically, we want to insert music creation in settings that were not originally designed for music making opening opportunities for non-musicians. A first step has already been taken by the ubiquitous music initiative. Ubiquitous music — or ubimus (Keller et al. 2014a) — emerges as a theoretical and methodological alternative to the technological approaches attached to the European instrumental musical tradition of the nineteenth century — grouped under the label acoustic-instrumental paradigm (see examples of the acoustic-instrumental approach in Tanaka 2009; Wessel and Wright 2002). Ubiquitous musical activities employ distributed resources and involve multiple stakeholders with various levels of expertise. While ubiquitous music research seeks to expand the access to creative activity by laypeople, the acoustic-instrumental paradigm enforces a strict separation between novices and musicians-performers.

One of the promising methodological approaches to ubiquitous music practice stems from embedded-embodied — or ecologically grounded — creative practice (Burtner 2005; Keller 1999; Keller 2000; Nance 2007). This methodological paradigm has emerged from a variety of creative projects realized since 1997 encompassing two strategies: (1) the construction of a theoretical framework for creative practices supported by embedded-embodied cognitive mechanisms (Basanta 2010; Burtner 2005;Costa 2014; Gomes et al. 2014; Keller 2012; Keller and Capasso 2000; Keller and Capasso 2006; Opie and Brown 2006); and (2) the concurrent development of design techniques coherent with this theoretical scaffolding, featuring participation and emergence as the two central creative driving forces (Keller et al. 2010; Keller et al. 2011a; Lima et al. 2012; Pimenta et al. 2014).

In a recent review of creative musical practice, Keller and coauthors (2014) mention four trends that demand tighter theoretical and methodological frameworks: (1) change of focus from creative products to processes (Marsden 2012); (2) increased reliance on information technology support (Truax 2002); (3) increased importance of local resources in creative activities (Keller 2012); (4) a shift from prescriptive models to descriptive and predictive models (Barreiro and Keller 2010; Ferraz and Keller 2014; Keller et al. 2011b; Mannis 2014). Feldman's (2000) critical metaphor of 'the composerly hand' summarizes a move toward reliance on extra-musical processes (computational tools, environmental sounds, extra-musical media, audience participation) that erode the image of the isolated composer creating music just in the head. The design strategies discussed in this paper provide examples of creative decision making grounded on local material resources. Thus, they contribute to fulfil the demands of items 3 and 4.

Regarding the third issue, the increase in the usage of local resources for creative action, Keller and partners (2014) point out that this tendency was fostered by site-specific art (Friedman et al. 2002) and by soundscape composition (Truax 2002), starting in the sixties. Until the advent of the ecologically grounded proposals in creative practice, place-related factors were not approached from a creativity-oriented design perspective (see Gomes et al. 2014; Keller 2012; Keller et al. 2014b for critical discussions). Given their reliance on local resources, ecological grounded creative practices present a new methodological problem: how to achieve effective support for stakeholders participating in creative activities in non-standard settings? Burtner (2011) termed this problem impracticality. Through geographically challenging projects, carried out by Keller (2004) and Burtner (2005) among other composers, it became clear that supporting creative activities in harsh settings demands a different approach. The three cases included in the second part of this paper target the usage of local resources during design activities, during improvisatory performances and during outdoor mixing activities, thus providing a common ground for very different methodological issues.

As pointed out in item 4, prescriptive approaches to music creation have been questioned from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Windsor (1995) highlights the limitations of the Schaefferian views on electroacoustic compositional practice. Lewis (2000) points out that music making based on improvisatory strategies resists the application of hierarchical organizational procedures. Keller and Ferneyhough (2004) propose the notion of analysis by modeling, an strategy that involves parametric exploration of multiple alternative musical outcomes based on features extracted from an extant work. These techniques are related to what Marsden (2012) describes as technologically based exploratory music theory, involving the search for features and descriptive models through computational tools. While it is not yet clear whether the study of music making by non-musicians will demand the development and application of technologically boosted theoretical approaches, multiple ubimus studies targeting musical activities by lay participants have unveiled effective support strategies that were previously deemed unworthy or irrelevant to creative music making (Keller and Lima 2015; Ferreira et al. 2015; Pinheiro da Silva et al. 2013).

Supporting statement 3, the impact of technology has fostered an expansion of music creative practice from a restricted group of technically savvy composers to a large variety of participants with diverse backgrounds and training. Until recently, novice usage was precluded by the deficiencies of traditional knowledge transfer mechanisms - such as musical scores, acoustic instruments and more recently audio tools that require specialized training. In spite of the insistence on adopting nineteenth-century notions by current musical-interaction research - such as the enforcement of virtuous instrumental performance (Wessell and Wright 2002) -, the massive availability of musical tools through the internet and the increased levels of support of audio tools in consumer-level devices have highlighted the need to design for a new type of musical agent, the casual participant. The case studies featured in this paper approach the inclusion of untrained stakeholders in a variety of contexts - from lay-musician interactions in improvisatory activities to outdoor mixing sessions by untrained subjects.

The text is organised as follows. Firstly, we propose the use of metaphors for creative action to foster creative outcomes in ubiquitous music making. Two targets are defined: professional creativity manifestations and everyday creative phenomena. Subsequently, we discuss the design and application of two metaphors: graphic-procedural tagging (featuring audiovisual trackers and audiovisual sketches) and time tagging. The following section presents a theoretical outline of comprovisational activities. We provide an example of an ecologically grounded comprovisation, The Maxwell Demon. Finally we address the limitations and the potential impact of creativity support strategies for audience participation, pointing to converging factors that find theoretical scaffolding in ecological cognition.

Metaphors for creative action

Metaphors for creative action are at the contact point between musical interaction metaphors (Pimenta et al. 2012) and the proposals laid out in interaction aesthetics applied to creativity (Keller et al. 2014c). They focus sustainable support of creative activity, covering on the one hand the results of musical activity — the creative products and the generation of resources — and on the other hand, dealing with the procedures required to achieve creative outcomes. The latter aspect differentiates the metaphors for creative action from domain-specific musical interaction metaphors (see the NIME Conferences for multiple examples of instrumentally oriented interaction). While musical interaction metaphors may provide the necessary support for musicians to be able to achieve musical results, metaphors for creative action target the enhancement of the participants’ creative potentials. These potentials can impact both the intended and the unintended by-products of the activity. Hence, one goal of the design is to ensure that the creative resources are readily available at the site of the activity.

The proportional notation systems are a classic example of support strategies for musical creative activities (Cope 1974; Keller and Budasz 2010). Since these methods do not attain the necessary flexibility to enable activities in everyday contexts, they can be labeled proto-metaphors. In proportional notation, the visual elements are directly correlated to the sonic parameters. For instance, a point represents a sound event with a short duration. A long line indicates a sustained sonic event. From a user-centric perspective, one of the limitations of proportional notation is the disjointness between the perception of the spatial representation of the event and the subjective perception of time. Approximately accurate interpretations of duration as absolute time are possible for expert musicians (e.g., "play a 20-second event as represented by a line on a staff"). But this ability is usually not found among novices. Graphic-procedural metaphors — as exemplified in the audiovisual trackers (tools akin to sequencers with a dynamic temporal display) — may provide a path to overcome this constraint.

Another promising line of inquiry involves the use of sonic resources as cues for creative action. Building on top of the concepts formulated in (Keller and Capasso 2006; Lockhart and Keller 2006), Nance (2007) expands the applications of the ecological framework to the realm of instrumental composition. In his words, “Damián Keller used [ecological psychology] to design software for composition, [in] (Keller 2000) and his work touch'n'go, [for] the first time ecological concepts have been used to compose a piece of (computer-based) composition. His approach was to build compositional models that parse time into event-dependent chunks… creating a system that is reconfigured whenever it finds new information. In other words, the temporal unit within which an event is observed, is (re)defined by its context” (Nance 2007: 15). Since the initial developments in the late 1990s, the integration of environmental cues to support creative decision making has become one of the key strategies of ecologically grounded creative practices. Hutchins (2005) suggests two ways to achieve stability in conceptual models. Cultural models achieve stability via a combination of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes, i.e. through social interaction. Conceptual models that are well established within a community use social interaction as a grounding strategy. The other mechanism for stable conceptual systems is the association of conceptual structure with material structure. This is called conceptual blending or anchoring (Keller et al. 2010).

Regarding conceptual relationships, material anchors are established when abstract elements are set onto a material pattern in such a way that the perceived relationships among the material elements are taken as proxies. In this case, the material pattern provides the handles for the anchoring process. Thus, Hutchins (2005) defines the ‘material anchor’ as the input space from which material structure is laid out as a conceptual blend. Material anchors range from the minimum case of individuation — an element becomes distinguishable from other elements — to complex relationships among networks of concepts. Creative musical activities offer a wide variety of opportunities for the application of anchoring strategies. For instance, sonic parameters have traditionally been handled through physical devices - such as keys, knobs and sliders. With the incorporation of graphic user interfaces, the relationships between the physical elements and the sonic outcomes have become increasingly flexible. This flexibility places a serious toll on the cognitive processes engaged during basic usage. A straightforward example of the disentanglement between the physical elements and the sonic outcomes is furnished by the use of virtual knobs on touchscreens. Despite the incorporation of multitouch and the higher tactile resolution of recent consumer portable devices, virtual knobs do not reproduce the type of support provided by physical knobs¹.

The two types of creativity support metaphors discussed in this paper — graphic-procedural metaphors and time tagging metaphors — employ cognitive resources based on anchoring processes. Time tagging uses sonic cues as proxies for the temporal distribution of sonic events. Graphic-procedural tagging relies on visual features that serve as guides for creative decision making. The next section features an example of the use of graphic-procedural metaphors for creative musical activities.

Example 1: Graphic-procedural metaphors for creative action

Graphic-procedural metaphors for creative action employ visual elements to organize temporal parameters both synchronously and asynchronously. Keller et al. (2015) report two exploratory design studies — involving complete creative cycles — which yielded public presentations of artistic products.

1. AV Trackers: procedures. Melo and Keller (2013) describe the creation and performance of the multimedia work Tocaflor for two clarinets and stereo electroacoustic soundtrack. Visual material was collected on site. A time-based bi-dimensional reference system was used to create visual anchors that provided parametric information. The visual anchors served as performance instructions within the audiovisual score. This design study targeted the use of local visual resources to produce audiovisual trackers for a mixed media performance.

The deployment of the metaphor graphic-procedimental tagging involved the participation of two musicians who employed an audiovisual score representing pitch and onset-duration parameters. Execution time was directly correlated to the spatial position of the tracker on the score. The colors extracted from the original graphic material, a picture featuring pink and yellow flowers, were repurposed to separate the instrumental sources. The sonic sources were chosen ad libitum by the musicians. Pitch content was indicated by the distribution of the colored markings on the vertical axis, dynamics being defined by the markings' widths. An unprocessed audio recording done on site, following the traditional soundscape methods (Truax 2002), was used to define the total duration of the piece.

Figure 1 summarizes the flow of information underlying the Tocaflor study. The first stage involved gathering visual data on site. This data was externalized as creative surrogates (Keller et al. 2015) by means of graphic transformations. The adopted reference system provided a mechanism to map visual features of the materials to sonic events. An AV tracker was used to guide the musicians' interpretation of the visual elements, providing support for the collocated, synchronous musical activity.

Results. Graphic-procedural tagging provided an effective strategy to support collocated, synchronous creative decision making. Through the application of a time-based reference system, by means of an audiovisual tracker, visual features were converted into instructions that, through the musicians' actions, yielded sonic events. The use of local resources indicated a viable strategy for opportunistic design in ubiquitous contexts (Hartmann et al. 2008; Keller et al. 2013; Visser 1994).

2. AV sketches: procedures. Audiovisual sketches were used as support proxies for the design of the multimedia installation Palafito/Palafita/Home-on-stilts. The first exhibit was held at the Floor4Art venue in Manhattan, New York. It took place during the month of November 2012 and ended with a closing gathering on December 1. The second exhibit took place in Denver, CO, USA, at the Museum of the Americas from June to September 2013. The artwork featured three sculptural objects and three video and audio tracks that made use of ecologically grounded techniques to process Western Amazon audio and visual footage. The installation was designed to foster the audience's active engagement with the multimodal elements of the piece. Visitors were encouraged to walk through the space to experience multiple combinations of sound fields. Following ecologically grounded creative methods (Burtner 2005; Keller 2000), the actions of the visitors were used to support the decision-making processes that shaped the aesthetic experience.

The structural depiction of the Palafito design study is similar to the AV tracker study (figure 2). Given the collective character of the endeavour, a common reference system becomes a requirement. Local decisions can only be made if the stakeholders have access to the status of the other participants.

Results. This study made use of volatile resources (Keller 2014) — in the form of audiovisual sketches — to increase the flexibility of the exchange. Local data - in this case representations of source sounds and footage - were shared through AV sketches. These sketches provided a reference system for the collective asynchronous decision-making process.

Example 2: Time tagging metaphors for creative action

Keller and collaborators (2010) proposed time tagging as a strategy to avoid the computational burden of the visually oriented approaches to audio mixing. This support metaphor provided a fertile ground for creative experiences in everyday settings featuring the participation of non-musicians (Farias et al. 2014; Keller et al. 2013; Pinheiro da Silva et al. 2013; 2014). Experiments with naive users doing simple mixing activities on portable devices indicated that the time tagging metaphor fostered creative results (Farias et al. 2014) and efficient usage of resources (Radanovitsck et al. 2011).

1. Time tagging: expert usage. Two generations of prototypes were designed and deployed. As an initial validation process, Keller et al. (2009) used an emulation of a first-generation mixDroid prototype for the creation of a complete musical work. The result was a seven-minute stereo sound work — Green Canopy On The Road — the first documented ubiquitous music work, premiered at the twelfth Brazilian Symposium on Computer Music, held in Recife, PE (Keller et al. 2009).

2. Time tagging: outdoor settings. After completing an initial validation phase involving expert usage, two complementary studies were conducted. Focusing on the demands of naive participants in everyday contexts, the second study (Pinheiro da Silva et al. 2013) comprised creative activities in public settings — at a shopping mall, at a busy street and in a quiet area featuring biophonic² sounds — and in private settings — at the home of each participant and at a studio facility. Six subjects participated in 47 mixing sessions using samples collected at two outdoors sites comprising urban sounds and biophonic sources. Creativity support was evaluated by means of a creative-experience protocol encompassing six factors: productivity, expressiveness, explorability, enjoyment, concentration, and collaboration (CSI-NAP — Carroll et al. 2009; Keller et al. 2011c). Outdoor sessions yielded higher scores in productivity, explorability, concentration and collaboration when compared to studio sessions. Compound effects of sound sample type and activity location were observed in the explorability factor when biophonic sound samples were used. Similar effects were detected on explorability, productivity and concentration in the conditions employing urban sounds.

3. Time tagging: domestic settings. A third study (Keller et al. 2013) made use of recorded vocal samples created by the participants. In order to untangle the effects of place and activity type, three conditions were studied: place, including domestic and commercial settings; activity type, i.e. imitative mixes and original creations; and body posture, realizing the mix while standing or sitting. Ten subjects took part in an experiment encompassing 40 interaction sessions using mixDroid. Subjects mixed the sounds and assessed their experiences through a modified version of the CSI protocol (Keller et al. 2011c). Explorability and collaboration factors yielded superior scores when the activities were carried out in domestic settings.

Results. The results point to the impact of the venue on the assessment of everyday creative experiences. The outdoor spaces were preferred by the participants of the second study. Domestic settings got slightly higher ratings in the third study. The profile of the subjects impacted the outcome of the third study but this trend was not confirmed by the second study's results.

Characterizing ubimus activities beyond the synchronous/asynchronous categories

An aspect that has been highlighted by ubimus research is the multilevel temporal profile of the activities involved in the creative cycle (Keller et al. 2014). While the utilitarian perspectives on human-computer interaction have usually been concerned with two modes of temporal organization — synchronous vs. asynchronous — creativity-centred design demands a more refined treatment of the temporal features of the activities. The order of the activities and the type of resources being handled demand distinctive approaches. From an ecologically grounded perspective, the problem of establishing whether a set of creative activities can be considered a composition, an improvisation or a comprovisation could be untangled through the observation of three variables: the temporal order of the activities, the agency and the activity type. Let us consider four cases: nineteenth-century written composition, ecocomposition, free improvisation and comprovisation (for our purposes, the first one just serves as a contextual reference to frame the discussion).

Figure 3. Comparison of activities and stakeholders in tightly structured and loose approaches to creative practice.

XIX-century written composition	ecocomposition
free improvisation	comprovisation

The proposed framework encompasses the type and the temporal order of the activities, and the profile of the stakeholders. Time is depicted as a sequence of activities, but given the exploratory nature of the model the temporal relationships are not quantified. Synchronous actions are vertically aligned and asynchronous actions are distributed horizontally along the time axis. The agency type follows the terminology proposed by Glaveanu (2013) with a slight modification: initiators are labelled agents rather than actors (to avoid confusions with the Actor-Network Theory - Latour 2005), and casual participants are labelled audience. Three types of activities are proposed. Deployment and selection roughly correspond to Jones’s and coauthors’ (2012) generation and evaluation activities - both activities involve the exploration or imitation of material and behavioral resources (see Keller et al. 2014 for a critical discussion of these concepts). It is implied that each of these actions involves multiple operations, encompassing either expand, constrain, shift and/or nil manipulations of resources. The activity label describes the partial outcomes. Deployment implies loosening resources, in the sense that they become available to be acted upon. Examples include gathering the sonic material, developing the synthesis or processing algorithms, or generating open-ended procedural instructions. Selection stands for fixing resources, encompassing choosing a set of sound samples from an available corpus, establishing values for parameter-based algorithmic processes, establishing temporal or procedural constraints, or sketching formal structures. Hence, after a deployment cycle, resources will be looser, more readily available and easier to act upon; and after a selection cycle resources will be tighter, more restrictive and more resistant to change. The third activity type is design. This is usually described as preparation in the creativity literature or pre-composition in the musical literature. We opt for a term that makes explicit the investment on support infrastructure. Within the musical realm, the design activity has been frequently confused with lutherie or instrument making. This limited notion provides an example of early domain restrictions (Keller et al. 2011). Creative musical activity demands a broader set of skills than those afforded by instrumental playing. It can be argued that by adopting an instrument-centred approach, the stakeholders tend to abide by hierarchical molds that may not favor the creative participation of non-musicians. Frequently, the participants become limited to the choices imposed by the instrument makers. Even when the creators take up the task of making their own instruments, sometimes they end up relying on ways of thinking that revolve around acoustic-instrumental practices. As soundscape composers and eco-composers have demonstrated (Basanta 2010; Truax 2002), sound making does not need to be limited to acoustic or digital musical instruments. These sources are just a small subset of a wide variety of sonic tools available to creators. From a broad ubimus perspective, the activity of design involves providing the necessary infrastructure to deal with a wide set of material, cognitive and behavioral resources required by music making while avoiding early domain restrictions (Keller et al. 2011; Lima et al. 2012; Pimenta et al. 2014).

Having laid out a theoretical context to deal with practices that employ a variety of strategies ranging from strictly separated decision making among creators and audience to fluid forms of interaction among all the stakeholders, we now proceed to describe a case study featuring a comprovisational approach situated within ecological creative practice.

Example 3: The Maxwell Demon, comprovisation from an ecological perspective

The Maxwell's Demon (TMD) is a comprovisation inspired by James Clerk Maxwell's 1871 experiment. In this experiment, a Maxwell demon is an imaginary creature designed to contradict the second law of thermodynamics, the tendency of every system towards entropy. Maxwell's experiment can be represented as a box with a divider placed in the middle, separating it two compartments, left and right. This partition has a door that can be opened and closed by an imaginary being (the Maxwell demon). The demon opens the door to allow only the fastest molecules to flow to one side of the chamber. The slower molecules flow to the other side, gradually causing one side to warm up, while the other remains cool. Thus entropy is reduced. We use TMD as an artistic metaphor focused on sound (rather than thermodynamics) to simulate an imaginary being - in our case, a stochastic algorithm - that seeks to control the sonic outcome to increase or to reduce the entropy of the system. Conceptually, we treat stochastic algorithms as Gelassenheit entities [Heidegger, 1966; Koutsomichalis, 2011]. A Gelassenheit entity has an "independence"³ in time and space, its dynamics are established by stochastic processes.

Design/Implementation: Guidelines Plan and Contingency Plan

Preparation: technological resources. We designed of a tool capable of producing sounds: 1) easy to manipulate; 2) accessible to all agents (through deployment on mobile devices running Android or IOS systems). The interface features four rectangles that act as controllers of additive synthesis oscillators. Up to four banks of oscillators can be used simultaneously. Four FM synthesis oscillators feature control parameters for frequency, duration and delay. Random processes are controlled by tapping a button. The frequencies vary from 220 Hertz to 1320 Hertz. Frequency increments are associated with gestures from left to right. There are three oscillators switches (on/off buttons) and two envelope controllers. One with short attack, decay, sustain and release durations and another with a long envelope preset. The left button at the top of the screen controls a stochastic algorithm connected to all the oscillators frequencies. This triggers random changes in each oscillator. The remaining three buttons control delay processing of the sound material. From left to right, the delay rates are 150 ms., 300 ms. and 750 ms.

We also developed a Pure Data patch that runs on a desktop computer with similar sonic features and functionalities as the algorithms for the mobiles. In this case, rather than being controlled by the participants, stochastic automated processes determine when and how sound events will occur. With the touch of a start button (green button - figure 4), the entire performance/sound experiment occurs in an automated way. A bell ring signals the end of the artistic narrative.

Preparation: location, equipment and participants. The experiment was performed in a small-sized studio (approximately 10x07 meters). Having Maxwell's procedures as inspiration, the experience involved two types of participants, those with traditional knowledge of music and those with little or no knowledge. Participants included five musicians and two non-musicians. All participants had college education. The non-musicians were three women - aged 25, 32 and 35. They possessed familiarity with basic musical concepts but had no formal training. The musicians were four men (ages 26 to 58) and one woman (22 years old). Music training and previous musical experience varied from 10 to 30 years. All participants (musicians and non-musicians) were given a mobile phone tunning a Pure Data (PD) patch [Puckette, 1997], adapted for MobMuPlat [Iglesia, 2016]. A computer running the automated algorithm was connected to four loudspeakers placed at the four corners of the studio where the performance/experiment took place.

Procedures. TMD is a comprovisation [Aliel, 2016]. Hence, it features a guideline plan and a contingency plan to outline which events are designed (the composed resources) and which elements are free to occur in an unpredictable manner (the improvised resources). The performance/experience is guided by the definition of scenarios [Sibertin-Blanc et al. 2011]. Each scenario features a free improvisation with cell phones lasting approximately seven minutes. The only guidelines given to the agents are: “move through space and use the mobile devices to produce sounds”. Therefore, the agents are free to move around the perimeter of the studio.

Sonic materials. An emulated bell (based on FM) plays at the beginning of the performance/experiment and it is heard again at the end. This sound is triggered by a PD patch. After ringing the first bell, the computer starts the preset parameters and selects the parameters of oscillators, pitches, dynamics, durations and delay processing. The entire performance lasts seven minutes and encompasses all the sonic contingencies resulting from the participants interactions and ´their explorations of the resources.

Assessment. Data was collected through interviews with the participants, on-site observations and analysis of audio and video recordings gathered during three sessions. The objective was to assess the interactions among the agents and how the resources were used, including: 1) initial state of the entities; 2) internal process dynamics; 3) impact of external processes on entities. The assessment of the scenarios was done through observations of the performance/experience and through analysis of the musical outcomes.

Results of The Maxwell Demon study

Contingencies. We consider interactions and behaviors leading to sound discovery as sources of contingencies. Much of the material produced in the three TMD sessions was rarely repeated, providing conditions of low sonic pregnancy (Aliel et al. 2016). The sounds produced by the algorithms were dynamically related to the actions of the agents. Given that a Gelassenheit entity produces sound content that may or may not be imitated by or contrasted with the outcomes produced directly by the agents, this guideline seems to be analogous to Maxwell's imaginary entity. In Maxwell's original experiment, the imaginary entity (demon) produces actions capable of separating molecules at varying temperature levels (just possible from a theoretical physics perspective), thus yielding a condition contradicting the second law of thermodynamics. This law proposes that environments with varying temperatures tend to equilibrate at lower temperature levels, due to entropy. In our analogy, we propose the inclusion of an unknown entity (gelassenheit) that provides stochastic modifications of the sonic outcome without biological control. Although each agent has a range of creative possibilities to choose from, the actions of the gelassenheit entity foster the selection of relevant material resources by the agents. Therefore, no matter how entropic the environment may be (through the agents’ choices) - the influence of the gelassenheit entity will tend to attain higher levels of organization.

Behaviors. The agents explored various material resources contained in the environment. Their mobility - in addition to the low dynamic range of the sounds produced by the mobile devices - provided a sonically dynamic and highly concentrated sonic environment in which the focus of attention changed constantly.

Musical expertise. Although the agents had sharply varying levels of musical knowledge, all of them showed similar technical ability while engaging with the sounds. We observed similarities in the three performances/experiments, involving intense interactions among the participants. The exchanges encompassed: algorithms x agents, agents x agents and agents x environmental resources.

Imitation. We observed that a large part of the interaction process was driven by imitation (confirming the strategy pointed out by Mannis, 2014). The mimetic processes entailed similar choices of audio processing techniques and similar dynamic changes of parameters. In general, there was a prevalence of proposals suggested by the musicians, but novice initiatives were also present.

Implications for audience participation in ecologically grounded creative practice

The results yielded by the graphic-procedimental tagging studies indicate a recurring strategy in ecologically based creative practice. The processes involved in the first set of studies suggest the existence of two distinct modes of support for the scaffolding of audience participation in creative activities. One mode is tied to the synchronous nature of the musical activities. Synchronous activities demand a unified temporal representation to interpret the visual data. In Tocaflor, visual data is used as a trigger for human performance of musical events mediated by an audiovisual tracker. Contrastingly, audiovisual sketches serve as material proxies for distributed resources, supporting decision making through a shared visual representation of time that can be accessed remotely by all the stakeholders. In Palafito, asynchronous activities featured audiovisual sketches as creative surrogates. While the latter strategy can accommodate the participation of non-musicians through unstructured exploratory actions, the former modality of support can only target musicians with enough expertise to employ the AV trackers’ visual information as a guide for bodily actions.

Given the use of local resources as scaffolds for creative actions, both approaches abide by the directives of ecologically grounded creative practice (Keller 2012; Keller and Lazzarini 2017; Keller et al. 2014c). Nevertheless, only the audiovisual-sketch resources meet the usability demands of ubiquitous music ecosystems (Lazzarini et al. 2014b) providing support for casual, untrained users. Audiovisual trackers require trained musicians that can synchronize their actions to complex visual cues with little look-ahead time. This type of decision-making activity places a high toll on cognitive resources, probably enlisting automatic mechanisms that are typical of expert performance (Shanteau et al. 2002). AV trackers fit within a narrow view on embedded-embodied musical cognition that links musical activity exclusively to bodily actions (Nijs et al. 2009). In order to enhance the range of applications of AV trackers for everyday usage, new design strategies are necessary.

The time tagging studies indicated the need of a broader understanding of everyday creative activity requirements. The environmental impact on the creative behaviors was consistently documented in the reviewed studies. Outdoor spaces got positive evaluations when compared to studio settings. Domestic spaces were chosen over commercial spaces. But the assessments were not uniform across all factors. Methodological adjustments are needed to provide a sharper picture of the variables that shape everyday creativity support. An issue not considered in these studies is the development of knowledge transfer mechanisms among lay participants and musically trained participants. Recent studies indicate that lay-musician interaction might enhance the level of engagement of novices in public settings (Ferreira et al. 2015; Keller and Lima 2017). Public exposure constitutes a difficult barrier for untrained participants. Through the involvement of professionals, novices are encouraged to explore new creative possibilities. Nevertheless, lay-musician interaction may require the use of resources designed to be accessible to novices without precluding the adoption of domain-specific knowledge. Creative surrogates might provide a viable strategy to be explored in future projects.

Regarding the support strategies devised in the comprovisational studies, the algorithmic generation of material resources seemed to provide a means to avoid stagnation. Both musicians and non-musicians established sonic and gestural imitative exchanges. Although most of the mimetic behaviors were initiated by musicians, the reverse was also observed. Three behaviors were prevalent: 1) interactions among a small number of agents; 2) exchanges of resources involving mimetic processes; and 3) explorations of new resources targeting greater variety. Despite the encouraging results, more performances and experiments involving larger and more diverse groups are needed to confirm the observed trends.

Summing up, the three sets of studies reported in this paper open several questions regarding the design for enhanced audience participation in creative musical activities. Since the initial proposals in ecocomposition (Burtner 2005; Keller 1999, 2000; Nance 2007), audience participation has been a key concern of ecologically grounded approaches to creative practice. The methodological advances provided by recent ubimus research (Pimenta et al. 2014) have opened new opportunities for the active participation of non-musicians in creative decision making. Everyday musical creativity (Pinheiro da Silva et al. 2013; Keller and Lima 2015) was unveiled as new phenomenon worth of systematic study. Music making in unconventional settings - including transitional, commercial and leisure locations not meant for artistic practice - demands new concepts and support strategies. The metaphors for creative action proposed in this paper - graphic-procedural tagging and time tagging - furnish partial solutions for these new creative situations. Concomitantly, algorithmic approaches to music have been pursued since the beginnings of computer science research (Hiller and Isaacson 1959). While some researchers define comprovisation as a technologically based perspective employing mixed predetermined and free procedures, others do not view technology as a necessary ingredient. Current ecologically grounded creative practices encompass a wide range of formats - including installation (Basanta 2010; Connors 2015), instrumental performance (Burtner 2011; Costa 2014; Nance 2007) and electronic live performance (Aliel et al. in press; Di Scipio 2008). As demonstrated by the case study featured in this paper, comprovisational procedures fit comfortably within ecologically grounded practices.

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Glossary

Activity: (Glaveanu 2013; Leont’ev 1978) - For Leont'ev, activity is at the center of human life: once an activity is complete it is replaced by another activity. Current socio-cultural perspectives on creativity propose that activity is a unit composed of a series of events - tied to actions - within a multi-tiered system of environment-organism processes.

Anchoring: (Keller et al. 2010) - An affordance-formation process that makes use of environmental cues to support creative actions.

Audiovisual Tracker, AV Trackers: (Keller et al. 2015; Melo & Keller 2013) Creativity support metaphors that use both aural and visual information.

Biophonic: (Pijanowski et al. 2011) - Sounds produced by living (animal) sources.

Creative Potentials: (Simonton 1990; Runco 2004) - Research that targets an increased ability to attain creative results, rather than directly obtaining those results.

Cognitive Load: (Sweller 1988) - Term referring to mental effort, sometimes associated with other factors such as pupil dilation and heart rate variability.

Communities of Practice: (Lave & Wenger 1991; Wenger 2010) - Groups of people who share a concern or a passion for an activity and learn how to do it better through permanent interactions.

Ecology of Devices: (Coughlan et al. 2012) - Computational resources that can be tackled as a system. Designing for transitions that enable groups to appropriately utilize an ecology of devices involves the concepts of seams, bridges, niches and the focal character of usage. A related ubimus concept is the ubimus ecosystem (Lazzarini et al. 2014).

Embedded-Embodied Cognition: (Gibson 1979; Hutchins 1995; Varela 1992) - Embodiment and enaction are closely related concepts. According to the embedded-embodied perspective, cognition emerges through body-world interactions, dynamic bodily process such a motor activity can be part of reasoning process, and offline cognition is also body-based. Enaction assumes that cognition evolved for action, thus perception and action are inextricably linked to each other.

Everyday Creativity: (Richards et al. 1988) - Everyday creativity can be operationally defined using only two product criteria: originality (or relative rarity of creation within a given reference group) and, meaningfulness (being comprehensible to others, not random ir idiosyncratic, and thus being socially meaningful). While professional creativity demands venues and skills specifically developed for creativity purposes, everyday creative phenomena occur in mundane contexts and do not require specific skills.

Hardware Repurposing: (Huang & Truong 2008) - Strategy used to create viable solutions to the problem of sustainability without a negative impact on the usability of materials. In ubimus research, mobile telephones and tablets are reused as platforms for the development of creative musical tools (Flores et al. 2010).

Material Affordances (Gibson 1977) - Opportunities for action on material resources as perceived by an active agent.

Rapid Prototyping: Strategy used to create viable solutions to the problem of sustainability without a negative impact on the usability of creativity support systems. Rapid prototyping targets the problem of large temporal investments on development, through the adoption of disposable, quick+dirty examples.

Place: (Rhodes 1961) - Creativity factor that encompasses the influence of the local material resources on creative activity.

Productivity, Expressiveness, Explorability, Enjoyment, Concentration, and Collaboration: creativity support factors proposed by (Carroll et al. 2009). These factor were further refined by (Keller et al. 2011b) by splitting Concentration into Attention and Engagement.

Proportional Notation Systems: (Cope 1977) - Part of a compositional trend toward less notational precision and greater interpretative freedom, "it represents a fundamental break with all previous notation system: the change from symbolic duration notation to spatial (or proportional) notation in which durations are indicated through horizontal spacing of sound and silences" (Sharon 2002).

Proprioception: Proprioception is related to the cognitive awareness of the body in space. It encompasses the perception of the movements and the position of the parts of the body.

Proto-Metaphors: These are material resources for creativity support that do not achieve the flexibility and applicability of actual metaphors.

Social Affordances: (Costall 1995) - Opportunities for action provided by social resources. In musical activities, compositional paradigms can be adopted as social affordances (Keller et al. 2010; Pimenta et al. 2009).

Ubiquitous Music: (Keller et al. 2009; Keller et al. 2014a) - An early definition referred to musical computing environments that support multiple users, devices, sound sources and activities in an integrated way, featuring mobility, social interaction, device independence and context awareness. A current proposal targets systems of human agents and material resources that afford musical activities by means of creativity support ecologies.

Notes