Skill/Ability: Pipeline Development

Octava, an app designed to augment live performance and arts events with contextual information in real-time, has been in development for 5 years, as a collaboration between myself, and composer Linda Dusman.

The UX/UI design challenges were very unique to the development of Octava. A blend of institutional memory, tradition, dedication to loyal audiences and a general resistance technological adoption has made many orchestra organizations resistant to the changing perceptions and tastes of the contemporary public.

Essentially, our goal was to augment the traditional concert experience with supplemental information that is queued to precise moments in the musical score, providing supplemental context that enriches the over all experience. It was hoped that this would elicit more of an active listening experience as opposed to passively allowing the music to wash over the audience.

Having spent a decade working on multi-disciplinary teams of scientists, artists, earth scientists, and satirists (to name a few), I very much knew the role data could play in broadcasting any information to the public. With this in mind, from the beginning of the Octava project I knew we desperately needed a way to gauge user impressions.

The challenge here is that aesthetic impressions are qualitative, not quantitative, so we needed a metric that could allow users to quickly assess their experience in an unguided way. Collaborating with Human Centered Computing at UMBC in 2011, I developed a hybrid qualitative reaction survey that fueled 3 full revisions of the Octava app over the next 5 years.

While not empirically conclusive, the data yielded from these surveys gave clear impressions of our user test audiences that guided my UX/UI design decisions, allowing us to completely revert many of the initial critiques.

Our first iteration of Octava (then called Symphony Interactive), featured a scrolling score that followed the orchestra through the use of a flight simulator throttle control. As laid bare by our user responses, this approach pressurized the experience as user felt compelled to watch the screen every moment. This was diametrically opposed to our goals so a major overhaul of the app was necessary.

The second iteration removed the scrolling score from the interface, and replaced it with a rotating “pin wheel,” where each spoke of the wheel was a single annotation. This design allowed for users to access the information as they saw fit, even if they wished to return to a previous annotation no longer relevant to the current moment of the music. This design completely turned our user responses around, letting the use Octava fold more seamlessly into the concert experience.

Building on the success found earlier, this version of Octava advanced the user experience further by providing additional context and information. While the pin wheel design was a step forward from the scrolling score interface, it too had limitations. While users felt the interface gave them direct access to the content, there was a still an element of confusion as to the progression through a given symphony. Addressing this feedback, the interface was once again completely redesigned, replacing the pin wheel interface with an interactive timeline. Each dot represent a single annotation, and the timeline progresses automatically during a performance. Users now had complete access to all information as well as a road map charting their course through lengthy compositions. Once again, our user reactions continue the positive trend.

Octava, an app designed to augment live performance and arts events with contextual information in real-time, has been in development for 5 years, as a collaboration between myself, and composer Linda Dusman.The art production design process for Octava posed a unique challenge. Everything we learned from our user testing has shown us that users are highly receptive to supplemental materials, but the chosen delivery method for that information was key in minimizing distraction. If the visual experience of Octava was going to enrich the experience of live performance, the aesthetic of the app needed to match the elegance of the music, environment, and texts being perceived.

The core challenge visually was to provide a visual context for the experience of the live performance that enabled an ease of reception with regard to the annotation texts, all while minimizing distraction. Here is an example annotation from an Octava performance:

Method

As a designer/animator, motion needed play a key role in uniting the musical performance and the app into a single experience, so I designed the UI to accommodate animated frame sequences that would progress in concert with the release of each annotation. A breakdown of the how the Octava app produces the above image reveals the relationship between text, interface elements and animations composited with Octava:

As the orchestra plays, annotations are released to coincide with particular moments in the performance. Simultaneously with the release of each annotation, the visual themes shift as well, providing a sense of progression, especially through longer, more dense compositions.

While ultimately interperative, this design work was not arbitrary, and based on researching musicological, historical, and cultural resources to produce colors and forms that complimented each symphony. I personally created or art directed/edited every animated animated sequence for Octava, acting both as the conceptual and technical director, as well as lead animator.Two methods were developed during production to facilitate varying level of animation.

1) Looping Method: 3-5 frame animated sequences were designed to loop endlessly within specific movements of a symphony. This method allowed for frame by frame deformation, as well as pan and scan methods. The image here showcases this approach as used for accompanying Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.”

2) Animation Scroll Method: As an alternative, the scroll method focuses on developing a single image across which a virtual camera will pan. With this method, the illusion of motion is created without the need for frame by frame animation. Below is an image of the animation scroll produced for Mahler’s 5th Symphony.

During the height of production for our Phase I Maryland Innovation Initiative grant, I oversaw a team of 7 interdisciplinary artists working around the country. The result was a series of animated sequences for the 30 most performed works nationwide. Below you will find a .gif sampling of visual materials from some of the symphonies within our catalogue. These changes would occur almost subliminally over time, but have been sped up hear to reveal the motion design within.

During my time as the Technical Director of the Imaging Research Center @ UMBC, we piloted a app that attempted to visualize set theory mathematics. UMBC President, Freeman Habrowski often utilized a elementary set theory problem during live events to showcase the role of creativity in mathematics. The problem is as follows:

29 children are in a classroom. 20 have dogs, and 15 have cats. How many students have a dog and a cat?

Due to nature of set theory, the answer to this problem is variable depending on how you assign cats and dogs to the children in the classroom. The app needed to allow users to easily assign the pets to characters on screen, and see how their choices affects the total number of students with dogs and cats. I lead the development team and was responsible for the UI design. The video below showcases this functionality.

Despite being a problem at the 7th grade level, rigid perceptions of mathematics prevent many adults from answering the problem. Can you!?

This project has been a collaboration with Linda Dusman and Michael Richards (of the Department of Music) and the Imaging Research Center. The goal of the Symphony Interactive project is to leverage the ubiquity of portable wifi enabled smart devices to contextualize and further enrich the experience of live orchestral concerts.

Traditional arts institutions such as symphony orchestras are at a crossroads. With attendance down, such organizations are developing new models of sustainable growth that will resonate with contemporary audiences, who increasingly expect multi-faceted, interactive, and user-defined experiences. This is reflected in the myriad of mobile “smart” devices, saturating everyday experience. Such devices provide an opportunity to enhance the experience of attending orchestra concerts by creating multiple streams of information and media through which a performance may be experienced and contextualized. By utilizing these technologies, such institutions can reengage the wider public through contemporary forms.

The research will develop software for mobile platforms that will allow users to view scrolling musical scores in realtime, synchronized with a live orchestra by a human time keeper sending pulses via wifi. Utilizing and iPad, users will be able to view portions of the score yet to be played or revisit prior moments of particular interest, as well as access detailed annotations with compositional, historical, and aesthetic information. The Symphony Interactive prototype will provide a unique permutation of the traditional concert experience, leveraging mobile technologies in a way that heightens engagement through active participation.

The See Intuit booth was commissioned by the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Science for the first annual USA Science and Engineering Festival at the National Mall in Washington D.C. The booth was designed with two goals in mind, to highlight contemporary scientific research on intuition, and as an interactive puzzle to help realize the implications of said research. More information can be found here.

The Imaging Research Center participated in the visualization of the UMBC Campus Master Plan Update process and presentation. Using an extensive 3D model of campus which I help manufacture several years before, we created three visualizations: a highly rendered animation showing future buildings; video motion tracking showing future buildings in live video settings, and a cutting-edge augmented reality display of the campus to illustrate over-arching campus planning themes.