Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
procedural creativity dimensions that have been usually excluded from musical
creativity fi eld studies. Two workshops were conducted to assess both technological
and domain-specifi c requirements for support of creative musical activities. The
fi rst workshop was conducted with music teachers and schoolteachers that had no
formal musical training. The objective of this workshop was to assess domain-specifi c
requirements for musical activities by educational staff. The second workshop
focused on technological support for tool development by nonmusicians. This
workshop yielded two software projects which involved user evaluations of creative
musical processes. Participants in the user studies included both musicians and
nonmusicians.
The ubimus planning protocol served to raise important questions regarding
technological usage by musicians and naive subjects in educational contexts.
Nontechnical approaches, such as those proposed by traditional soundscape activi-
ties (Schafer
1977
), may not be suited for introducing nonmusicians to sonic com-
position. Naive subjects may respond better to technologically based approaches
which emphasize aspects of the relationship between the personal experience and
the environment. The ubimus design approach was effective to assess the usability
of musical tools at early stages of development. Prototypes were implemented and
usability studies were carried out by undergraduate information technology stu-
dents within a 3-week time-slot. Sharp differences were observed in the type of
requirements expressed by musicians and nonmusicians regarding creativity sup-
port tools. Despite these differences, both groups of subjects regarded the use of
software prototypes within exploratory musical activities as being fun and
expressive.
The ubimus planning and ubimus design protocols highlighted the existing limi-
tations in the evaluation of creative activities in real-world settings. Although the
protocols included careful consideration of the role of the participants within the
design cycle, the data obtained did not provide enough information on the dynamics
of the creative processes. Place and product creativity factors were considered both
as individual and group manifestations of creative behavior. But the assessment of
procedures was limited to the analysis of the participants' self reports. The study
helped to identify a methodological gap in the development of procedural support
for creativity, namely, the lack of time-based methods to study long-term creative
musical practice.
This section explored the implications of adopting social relational properties
within the context of aesthetically oriented ubiquitous music design. Experimental
results indicated that nonmusicians responded better to technologically based
support for creative activities when compared to musically trained subjects. A
procedural limitation of the studies was the lack of time-based methods to deal
with the assessment of local resource usage in creative activities. Support for
distributed creativity poses at least two challenges: (1) the availability of local
resources for creative action and (2) the emergence of consensus through shared
social resources.
