Playtest #2

Today I did my second playtest. I wanted to do this earlier, but earlier appointments failed. Out of this playtest I wanted to get information about what kind of gestures were linked to musical changes. So how do children move when; - They want to make the music more busy or calm, - They want to make the music louder or quieter, - They want to stop the music. I used two short loops out of Griegs Hall of the Mountain King. One short loop was very calm, the other was very busy. I gave the tester one conducting baton (selfmade). The children sat around in a circle on their chairs. One child was conducting in the centre of the circle (confronting their 'crowd', not my laptop where the music came out of), I let the child conduct for a short time, asked them what they wanted to do (make the music louder or quieter of busy or calm), or asked them to do something. They had to decide how to gesture this. When they were done, they chose somebody else out of the circle to play with the baton. Children were very eager to be chosen. Funny thing was that one girl didn't pay attention to how she was holding the baton and the other kids explained her how to, and argumented this by explaining where the grippiece was for. This clearly shows that children of the age of 6 are aware of affordances. I taped the whole playtest, however I'm not allowed to put images of the children online, I'm only allowed to use the tapes for documentation of my research. For the interaction I tried to make logical changes in music according to the movements of the children. The music can be more busy or calm, louder or quieter or stopped. This is all done by hand, I don't have a program yet. But as shown in the post before, the technical prototype is on its way. Results: - Children all use the same movement to stop the music. This is a quick, tight, decisive movement of both hands with the baton down. - To start the music most children use the same movement to stop the music. - Children hear that loud/quiet and busy/calm are two different things, but are not conscious of how to make different movements of this. However: - Unconsiously they do make different movements for this: - To change the volume of the music they make bigger or smaller movements - To change the music to calm or busy they make quicker or slower movements - The children like the music itself, but after a while (7 minutes) the children in the circle found to music to be boring. This was because I was only switching between two very short loops, so it is logical that after 7 minutes of watching children play, music gets boring. But this does show that the music needs to have a lot of variations, even in the same playstate. - Children asked after 7 minutes of watching somebody play on the same music to change to music to something else. This shows that it is very good to give the ability to choose different musical pieces.