Musicking Artifact
Tubularium was the first exploration of the PhD project by Lucia Montesinos Garcia. Tubularium is a tangible music interface designed to support non-musicians in music making.
Tubularium was designed following a Research-through-Design methodology to enquire into how to design a human-sized tangible interface that could allow participants without any musical skills to make music, facilitate enough agency so that participants feel like they are making music, and overall provide an aesthetic experience.
This resulted in a set of 7 acrylic pipes, each 110 centimeters tall, arranged in a line. Each of the pipes contains a LED light and is divided into three touch-sensing areas, corresponding to different octaves. These sensing areas are connected to a capacitive touch sensor that is then connected to a mapping software, which, based on the current configuration, triggers a determined sound.
To interact with Tubularium, you simply touch the sensing areas and a note will trigger, followed with light feedback. Using a controller, participants can change the instrument sound, key, and emotion, and switch between a single-note mode for improvising melodies, and a chord mode where the lights guide you through a chord progression based on the emotion chosen.
Tubularium 3
Publications
There is one paper published about it, which you can check out here. The paper presents the design and evaluation of Tubularium. The main findings are that that Tubularium successfully allowed non musicians to engage in music making, and for many it resulted in a an aesthetic experience. Moreover, we observed that the full-body scale of the interface mattered, and that it allowed participants to approach it and appropriate it in many different ways.
Credits
Lucia Montesinos Garcia, Anders Løvlie, Halfdan Hauch Jensen
Project date
2024