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doing the mix while sounds are being played. Several experiments encompassing
domestic and public settings have shown that time tagging provides effective
support for creative musical activities in everyday settings (Keller et al.
2010
,
2013
;
Pinheiro da Silva et al.
2013
,
2014
; Radanovitsck et al.
2011
).
As previously stated, spatial tagging is defi ned as an interaction metaphor that
makes use of virtual or material visual cues - anchors - to support creative activity.
The spatial-tagging metaphor was encapsulated in the Harpix prototypes. In Harpix
1.0, the visual elements of the interface can be manipulated directly, establishing a
straightforward relationship between user actions and sound events. Keller et al.
(
2011b
) tested the application of spatial tagging in musical epistemic activities.
Three subjects realized 37 interaction essays, comprising exploratory, imitative, and
product-oriented activities. Six creativity support factors were assessed: productiv-
ity, expressiveness, explorability, concentration, enjoyment, and collaboration.
Enjoyment and expressiveness were highly rated during product-oriented activities,
while exploratory activities yielded high enjoyment scores. Contrastingly, collabo-
ration was poorly judged in all conditions.
The results of this experiment - encompassing three types of musical activities
by three subjects - indicated good support for creative and exploratory activities,
with particular emphasis on two factors: enjoyment and expressiveness. However,
the collaboration and explorability factors were not evaluated positively, and imita-
tive activities did not yield high scores.
Recapitulating, anchoring serves as a mechanism for linking constraints of the
external structure of the environment to constraints on cognitive operations. This
view implies that both memory and processing loads can be reduced if the con-
straints of the activity can be built into the physical structure of the material
resources. The problem faced by system designers is thus reduced to fi nding consis-
tent relationships between the abstract concepts and the local resources available
during the activity. In other words, appropriate metaphors for creative activity may
handle material relational properties through direct couplings between material and
conceptual operations. This hypothesis was tested through the implementation of
two interaction metaphors: time tagging and spatial tagging. Time tagging used
local sound cues to support creative decisions. Spatial tagging employed visual cues
to enable exploratory creative actions. Both metaphors showed good support for
creative musical activities but did not fare well when collaboration was involved.
6.4
Social Relational Properties: Distributed Creativity
Converging trends in creative practice research (Keller and Capasso
2006
; Truax
2002
), educational research (Loi and Dillon
2006
), and music education (Burnard
2007
) point to the local context as a key factor in shaping creative experiences.
These approaches propose creativity as a research focus within socially informed
paradigms, gathering support from ecological methodologies (Keller
2000
; Loi and
Dillon
2006
) and activity theory research (Burnard
2007
; Keller et al.
2010
; Leont'ev
