Abstract:

In this paper, we report the experiences of students and teachers in a master course in Musical Communication and Music Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The students were exposed to vocal sketching [1], a novel sound design method, both as their course material and for the examination. The results in terms of learning outcome and course experience were confirmed and more than convincing, while the results in terms of validating the efficacy of the method were meagre.

As part of our research, we designed an experiment where the students first interviewed preschool children who were asked to describe a fantasy musical instrument and then built it. The course schedule included lectures on voice sketching, sound synthesis, sound quality, new musical instruments, parameter mapping, and music programming. The project work and idea was presented during the first lecture, eight weeks before meeting the children.

The interview took place in a workshop at the Swedish Museum for Performing Arts who had an exhibition of new musical instruments. Student/child pairs visited the exhibition in order to 1) familiarize themselves, 2) establish communication, and 3) get a common point of reference in terms of the exhibited instruments. After this process, the pairs completed an interview session inspired by [2]. The parents and teacher could join in if desired.

The students got two weeks to build the instruments and present these at the museum. The purpose was not to evaluate the instruments, but to explore the vocal sketch method. The design and building phase was a prototyping task which the students were comfortable with. All design decisions needed to be set in relation to the course literature. All the presented projects followed a scenario- and contextual-inspired design approach [3] where a target solution needed to be established quickly grounded on a basic understanding of the agent (the child), its goals, and its presumed actions [4], and where the child mainly acted as informant [5].

While all the children could voice sketch, few actually did so in the interview. Despite this, the finished instruments matched the expectations of the children, and the course work satisfied the intended learning outcomes. As a research outcome, we suggest that future studies should include training vocal sketch techniques to produce suitable sounds. As for the pedagogical outcome, we are convinced from both the high quality of the works and the unusually positive course evaluations compared to previous years that the unproved research method was appropriate as course material. The bidirectional challenge in the research where students know that the method is experimental is hypothesized to further boost student motivation.

References:
[1] Lemaitre, G.; Houix, O.; Voisin, F.; Misdariis, N. & Susini, P. Vocal imitations of non-vocal sounds. In PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2016, 11, e0168167.
[2] Manion, L.; Morrison, K. & Cohen, L. Research Methods In Education. Routledge, 2018.
[3] Muller, M. Participatory Design: The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, CRC Press, 2007, 1061-1081.
[4] Nesset, V. & Large, A. Children in the information technology design process: A review of theories and their applications. In Library & Information Science Research, Elsevier BV, 2004, 26, 140-161.
[5] Druin, A. The role of children in the design of new technology. In Behaviour & Information Technology, Informa UK Limited, 2002, 21, 1-25.

Keywords:

Research, motivation, course material, sound design, prototyping, interview, preschool children, master students, museum.