Audio Delivery and Territoriality in Collaborative Digital Musical Interaction

This paper explores the design of collaborative musical software through an evaluation of the effects different audio delivery mechanisms have on the way groups of co-located musicians work together in real time via a software environment. Ten groups of three musically proficient users created music using three experimental interfaces. Logs of interaction provide evidence that changing the means of audio delivery had a statistically significant effect on the way users worked together and shared musical contributions. In addition, interview transcripts indicate a number of experiential differences between the audio delivery configurations. The findings and design guidelines presented in this paper are intended to inform future systems for musical collaboration, and also have implications more broadly for the design of multi-user interfaces for which sound is a fundamental component.