Benjamin Reynhart

 The other day I presented my Sampler Jacket to the rest of the class, and although it didn’t go too badly, I forgot to demonstrate some key features of my jacket (notably the physical metaphor sound manipulation interfaces of the zipper and the hood).

Since then I have conducted considerable testing on the jacket, and come up with some interesting findings and conclusions.

Testing

To properly document how effective the interface was, and what extent it met its original goals, I decided to video a couple of friends and myself jamming with the jacket. After informing them of the controls, functions and suggesting that they prepare a sample of a song they would like to use on an MP3 player, I gave them free reign to do experiment for as long as they wanted. A couple of samples of what we came up with are below.

Observations

+ One thing that really stood out when using the interface is the ability to record any sample from any portable music device or microphone. This choice and freedom given to the wearer is invaluable, and I think gives the wearer ownership and allows a better connection to the music. The whole process of recording a sample seems really natural, and I observed that my friends could use it perfectly after a very short time (considered natural interface = short learning curve).

+ The mixing controls proved to be very easy to use and understand, this is thanks to research that proceeded the design recomending sliders for both volume and tempo controls (providing tactile feedback).

+ The zipper and hood gesture-capture enables a deeper level of expression and personal treatment to the sound. I found that the glitcher effect (controlled with the zip) was played more like a seperate instrument, than an effect to a previous sample. This is an interesting development because the glitcher was never intended for this use, however has transformed into a different feature all-together.

+ Collaboration; The sampler jacket was never intended to be used as a collaborative tool, however after a period of use we found ourselves collaborating with the jacket, assigning different roles and improvising with different instruments. One scenario that occured was having the jacket wearer in charge of the overall mixing (similar to a DJ) and someone else improvising with a Stylophone plugged in to the input. The DJ then took samples from the live performance and manipulated those sounds and integrated them with the rest of his composition, with the instrument player still improvising over the top. In the following video, you can see the DJ sampling a scale of the stylophone, slowing down the tempo and using it as the bassline in a track.

<– Video of collaboration –>

- The system is not perfect, and I recieved some valuable feedback from my friends using the interface that will definately be considered if the project is developed further. The main grievance with my system is switching between the tracks, and the sliders for tempo and volume being out of sync with the software. The obvious solution to this to use motorized sliders like many mixing desks do, this would be difficult to achieve technically, without completely re-structuring my project.

- The second disadvantage of this system is visual feedback. Currently the user has to rely on observing the max patch (on a laptop) to keep track of the mixing settings and currently selected track. A future consideration might be a small LCD screen embedded in the jacket to reflect the current settings.