Mr Chris Nash
Nationality: United Kingdom
Year: 2007
Subject Area: Science and Engineering
Website: Visit (opens in a new window)Having spent a year defining and identifying the role of ‘virtuosity’ (“the enabling factor of fluency in a domain, through mastery of a device or system” – from my first year report) in computer music, I am in the process of developing a large-scale usability study to observe how experts use a composition tool (reViSiT, developed previously) in the real world. Currently, this involves preparing the program and its online community for the study, and taking measures to attract as many participants as possible. It is hoped unobtrusively to monitor several hundred users (even a thousand or more) over several months of normal use, in an effort to build usage profiles and establish learning curves (and barriers) that can be used to build and verify design methodologies for expert music systems. A number of other smaller projects concerning the aforementioned focus, as well as music HCI in general, are also planned.