Semantic strategies in ubiquitous music: Deploying the sound sphere ecology in transitional settings

We report the results of a study involving twenty subjects doing musical activities in transitional settings, supported by an ecology of tools based on the metaphor for creative action Sound Sphere. The Sound Sphere Ecology (SFS) is a set of web-based tools, loosely organized around audio mixing and processing tasks. It employs verbal strategies for knowledge transfer to provide support for lay participants and specialists. To understand how the stakeholders influence and are influenced by this design strategy, we carried out a series of experiments involving assessments of the participants' behaviours and of the sonic products during various creative musical tasks with SFS. The overall results were positive, indicating that the proposed metaphor provides effective support for casual interaction, highlighting the participants' level of engagement. As a downside, the assessments pointed to ease of use as the lowest and less consistent item among the rated creative factors. We discuss the implications of these results and propose various design enhancements to enable the usage of a larger pool of resources. Considering the heterogeneous profiles of casual stakeholders, methodological refinements are also proposed to assess the knowledge gained by the participants during the exploratory activities, while augmenting their ability to share knowledge. This is one of the first studies on creativity-action metaphors for casual interaction.