Design Process: Phase 1 - finlayrodbert/soundtrak GitHub Wiki

Background

A large amount of background description and research can be seen in the first two assignments: Assignment 1: Literature review and Assignment 2: Concept proposal (Pages 13-16) respectively. To summarise, I will include some extracts from each which describe the problem space.

(concept proposal pg.13) Background and Motivation In the modern day, more musicians and recording artists have access to the necessary tools (hardware and software) that are required to write, record, produce and create music from their own home, more so than ever before. As a result of this, as well as recent pandemic considerations, many musicians are now choosing to use the home studio environment as a place where they produce their music, as opposed to the more traditional “professional” recording studios. With an increase in home studio usage, it is important to understand how musicians are using these spaces, how they are able to work in a way that fosters creativity, how they collaborate with one another and effectively work on a project together. This presents another challenge as many will often find themselves working in different physical locations, either synchronously or asynchronously on a project or perhaps even working asynchronously whilst in the same location due to physical limitations that come with working in a home and living space. Initial Research Problem Identification The problem space defined above in the Background Section identifies an area where new designs should be considered – to build some tool that can improve or allow for easier creativity and collaboration between musicians working in the home studio environment.

From the first assignment, I was able to deduce a set of key points, which could be interpreted into guiding parameters for further design work as well as topics to cover in the interview process (see next section below).

soundtrak must be perceived as a legitimate tool by its target audience. Musicians and their collaborators have to be able to believe that it is of high quality and will be able to produce good results for them.

To maintain creative flow, soundtrak needs to allow musicians to collaborate seamlessly whenever they wish to, at a pace that suits them best.

Collaborating artists must be able to feel connectedness, as well as experience social presence through the conveyance of information when using soundtrak in distributed locations.

soundtrak must not impinge on the musical creativity and craft of its users any more than necessary. Although, some musicians will always find new ways of being creative, soundtrak should not intentionally be restrictive.

soundtrak should facilitate different levels of access or privilege to users in order to match their individual roles within a project. This is to ensure the cognitive load taken on by each participant in a collaboration is appropriately limited to their duty’s requirements.

Every feature, parameter, and option in soundtrak must be easily fine tweakable to meet a specific musician’s requirements. They need to be comfortable and make themselves feel at home in the studio.

soundtrak should facilitate communication between collaborators in whatever form is best suited to their unique connection’s needs and the project’s needs as a whole piece of work. It must be inherently easy for musicians to use soundtrak in their preferred way, as a collaboration tool.

Interviews

For my research, I had chosen to conduct a few interviews with musicians and home studio users who I had access to. The aim of these interviews was to gain a better understanding of the problem space (collaborative music making in the home studio) from those on the front line, trying to undergo such activities. I will find out how they currently may be working and collaborating in order to further uncover their underlying goals and values that would be worth consideration for further design.

For each of these interviews (~40 mins each), I used a common set of questions that could be expanded upon or otherwise tailored to fit each participant:

How long have you been playing music for?

Can you tell me about the bands/projects that you've been involved with?

What makes you want to make music?

So with projects that you're on currently or you've been working with in the past, what methods and tools do you use to write, record and produce all this music?

Why do you choose to use the methods that have been used in the past or present?

What are some of the pros/cons of each method?

How did each of these collaborations come about?

With each of these collaborations, what sort of means do you use to communicate with each other?

Have you had occasions where you're working on something asynchronously?

What would attract you to each of these different kinds of studios and recording environments? (home vs professional studios)

In terms of time frames that have been on each project when working in the home or compared to a professional sort of studio, How do you compare your experiences?

How do you think time pressure affects your creativity and your creative output as a musician?

When you are working and collaborating with other musicians, what measures are made for you each to feel like you're connected with each other when you might be working remotely or when you are there physically?

How would you say the cognitive load of working in a home studio compares to working in a professional studio?

Would you say that having less things on your mind will necessarily improve your creativity?

What do you think you need from your production or collaboration tools, what do you value in them?

Whilst these questions allowed me to gain some deep understanding of nuanced specific issues that some participants face, the overriding problem that I was able to discover/confirm was that it is currently difficult if not impossible for musicians to effectively collaborate on producing a music project synchronously unless they are all in the same room at the same time. Contemporary workarounds tend to involve sending audio files or other bits and pieces of a project over shared file storage systems such as google drive or dropbox, where the receiver has to download them and reassemble the project in their own environment. Which seems rather clunky, slow and inefficient in a world where online collaboration tools such as google docs have become standardised for working on a shared document.

Further details of this research can be seen here -> Interview Transcript Summary

soundtrak is my concept for a solution to this problem. The Idea is that musicians and producers can each have synchronous interactive access to the musical project in the form of a Digital Audio Workstation session. This would allow for musicians to see and listen to the project as a whole, add/modify different instruments, parts and sections, basically providing all the features of a complete DAW but to also have multiple collaborators on the session simultaneously in order to reduce the social and communicative barriers that come with working remotely from one another.

My inspiration for the concept had come from tools like google docs, how it has become a standard for working on a shared collaborative document/project. There is nothing quite like that in the world of music making, so I combined the idea of synchronous (remote) collaboration (as seen in google docs) and mixed it with the DAWs that musicians and producers use to make their music.

So I decided to chat with each of my interviewees about the idea briefly after asking the above questions. This gave even better, specific opinions on what each of them value, would like to see and why - in regards to my design concept. The overwhelming majority of feedback received was positive, they identified that the idea targets a real problem that exists in the area of music making and its implementation would provide each of them an improved experience in their collaborative musical projects.

These findings can be seen in the Interview Transcript Summaries (at the end of each individual interview) or in the raw Interview Recordings.

Following this process, I was able to piece together some of the unique features that my design should encompass based off of feedback from my participants.

Synchronous Collaboration
Cross-DAW Collaboration
Workload Management
Advanced Version Control

Each of these features are explain in detail in the Final Design Guidelines page