What Can the Language of Musicians Tell Us about Music Interaction Design?

Abstract

It is hard to create good interaction designs for music software, or to substantially improve existing designs. One reason is that music involves diverse and complex concepts, entities, relationships, processes, terminologies, and notations. An open challenge for interaction designers is to find systematic ways of channeling the tacit, specialized knowledge of musicians into designs for intuitive user interfaces that can capably support musically skilled users, without excluding those with less technical musical knowledge. One promising new approach to this challenge involves the application of research from the theory of image schemas and conceptual metaphors (Johnson 2005; Lakoff and Núñez 2000; Rohrer 2005, 2007). This theory posits that all human conceptual abilities are ultimately grounded in universal, prior, sensory-motor experiences of space, force, containment and orientation, although the development of such groundings may be culturally influenced. The theory further posits that the nature of these groundings is amenable to empirical investigation, for example by analyzing linguistic constructs in texts