Forceful Action and Interaction in Non-Haptic Music Interfaces

One key challenge for designing meaningful and intuitive user interfaces without haptic or visual feedback is to provide users with a clear sense of agency similar to that which characterizes everyday motor cognition. In this paper, we explore the idea that people with dissimilar musical training conceive of sound and their bodily gestures in relation to the environment in fundamentally different ways. To account for these differences, we propose two paradigms for music interface design – an action paradigm and an interaction paradigm. We argue that these paradigms may be used in the design of new music interfaces, and we present a force dynamics-based, mid-air interface designed for this study, which distinguishes between action-like and interaction-like operations.