Week 10 Research about music and defining some terms

Doing a bit of background research about interaction design, persona's and other relative terms and concepts made it easier for me to further the development of the scenario part of the project, and communicate valuable ideas to the other team-members affecting our design process. 

Personas
The aim of a persona is to "Develop a precise description of our user and what he wishes to accomplish. The best method as described within 'The Inmantes Are Running The Asylum' is to construct fabricated users with names and back stories who represent real users of a given product. These users are not as much a fabrication as a byproduct of the investigation process. The reason for constructing back stories for a persona is to make them believable, such that they can be treated as real people and their needs can be argued for. Personas also help eliminate idiosyncrasies that may be attributed to a given individual.[Cooper, Allan (2004). Inmates Are Running the Asylum, The: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Sams Publishing. p. 93. ISBN 0-672-32614-0. Retrieved 4 Okt 2011.]

Affective interaction design
Throughout the process of interaction design, designers must be aware of key aspects in their designs that influence emotional responses in target users. The need for products to convey positive emotions and avoid negative ones is critical to product success.[10] These aspects include positive, negative, motivational, learning, creative, social and persuasive influences to name a few. One method that can help convey such aspects is the use of expressive interfaces. In software, for example, the use of dynamic icons, animations and sound can help communicate a state of operation, creating a sense of interactivity and feedback. Interface aspects such as fonts, color pallet, and graphical layouts can also influence an interface's perceived effectiveness. Studies have shown that affective aspects can affect a user's perception of usability.[Sharp 2007]
User interface design
Like user interface design and experience design, interaction design is often associated with the design of system interfaces in a variety of media but concentrates on the aspects of the interface that define and present its behavior over time, with a focus on developing the system to respond to the user's experience and not the other way around


Haptics
Touch is the earliest sense to develop in the fetus. The development of an infant's haptic senses and how it relates to the development of the other senses such as vision has been the target of much research. Human babies have been observed to have enormous difficulty surviving if they do not possess a sense of touch, even if they retain sight and hearing. Babies who can perceive through touch, even without sight and hearing, tend to fare much better. Touch can be thought of as a basic sense in that most life forms have a response to being touched, while only a subset have sight and hearing.
Haptic perception
Haptic perception is the process of recognizing objects through touch. It involves a combination of somatosensory perception of patterns on the skin surface (e.g., edges, curvature, and texture) and proprioception of hand position and conformation.  By employing different textures and haptic feedback we can aim to create an interesting and engaging interaction between user and object!

People can rapidly and accurately identify three-dimensional objects by touch.[1] They do so through the use of exploratory procedures, such as moving the fingers over the outer surface of the object or holding the entire object in the hand.[2]

Haptic technology, or haptics, is a tactile feedback technology that takes advantage of a user's sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, or motions to the user.[1]Perhaps we can use vibration for feedback??
This mechanical stimulation may be used to assist in the creation of virtual objects (objects existing only in a computer simulation), the control of such virtual objects, and the enhancement of the remote control for machines and devices (teleoperators). It has been described as "doing for the sense of touch what computer graphics does for vision".[2] Although haptic devices are capable of measuring bulk or reactive forces that are applied by the user, they should not be confused with touch or tactile sensors that measure the pressure or force exerted by the user to the interface.

Haptic technology has made it possible to investigate in detail how the human sense of touch works by allowing the creation of carefully controlled haptic virtual objects. These objects are used to systematically probe human haptic capabilities, which would otherwise be difficult to achieve. These new research tools contribute to the understanding of how touch and its underlying brain functions work.

Research article about music: 

MILESTONE: 

 These studies about how music affects people's emotions and memories provided some interesting knowledge which is now narrowing our focus for the use of MUSIC to connect users and create new shared experiences. Generally the studies expressed the positive effect music had on participants moods, that listeners tend to multitask and that most people listen to music an average of 161min per day.

An Relevant study about listening to music:

A new study out of Penn State finds that music really can soothe the savage beast, up to a point, and it really doesn't matter what kind of music you listen to. As long as you like it.
"If you like music and choose to listen to it, it's probably going to make you feel better regardless of what type it is," says associate professor of psychology Valerie N. Stratton.

It turns out that most of us listen to it a lot, but usually when we're doing something else.

"There was really very little out there that looked at how people listened to music in their daily lives."

So the researchers recruited 47 college students, including 25 music majors, and asked them to keep a diary for 14 days, noting the kinds of music they listened to. They were also asked to pick various moods from a list, showing their moods before, during and after listening to the music
.
This is not exactly a startling finding, but the researchers found that college-age students overwhelmingly prefer to listen to rock music, whether hard, heavy or modern, and that includes music majors. If they weren't listing to hard rock, the non-music majors preferred country and soft rock. The music majors opted for classical and jazz after rock. The researchers were a bit surprised to find that non-music majors listened to more music than the music majors. The non-music majors listened to an average of 161 minutes of music per day, compared to 117.7 minutes for the music majors.  That's why a 3 hour battery life is a viable design decision.

If the results of the study apply to all of us, regardless of age, we don't spend a whole lot of time just sitting and listening to music. Most of the participants in the study listened to music while doing something else, and that activity apparently influenced their choice of music.
Soft background music is neat while socializing with your friends, but if it's time to hop on the exercise machine and work on those abs, a little jazz might be preferable, the researchers found.

The results of the study suggest that music is terrific when it comes to reinforcing, or elevating our positive moods, and can chase away some of our negative feelings, with one peculiar finding.

Among the non-music majors, sad, hateful and aggressive moods eased up a bit. But that didn't work for the music majors. For them, those feelings remained either unchanged, or rose slightly.

 

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99640&page=1

Melodies and Memories

It probably wouldn't do that for everybody, and that gives rise to an old question. Why does music have such a profound impact on our emotions?
Stratton says there are probably some physiological reasons. Different types of music may induce different "brain rhythms," she says. Fast music may cause the heart to speed up, for example.
But there are also cultural reasons why some music works for us, provoking very specific emotions.

Our "past associations" with certain pieces may have a major impact on how we react to a particular song.

By sharing a listening experience participants will form new, shared connections and memories associated with a certain song, genre or style.
Hearing a very happy tune may have a sad affect on someone who associates that song with an unfortunate experience.
"If you heard that song during a very sad event in your life, that's going to bring back that kind of memory," Stratton says. "It's a very personal thing."

 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99640&page=2

Music seems to offer a novel method of communication rooted in emotions rather than in meaning. Research shows that what we feel when we hear a piece of music is remarkably similar to what everybody else in the room is experiencing.

Songs facilitate emotional bonding and even physical interactions such as marching or dancing together and thus may help cement ties that underlie the formation of human societies. In addition, tunes may work to our benefit on an individual level, manipulating mood and even human physiology more effectively than words can.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-music-moves-us

Music, Emotion and the Brain, Geetanjali Vaidya

One great problem that arises in trying to study music's emotional power is that the emotional content of music is very subjective. A piece of music may be undeniably emotionally powerful, and at the same time be experienced in very different ways by each person who hears it. The emotion created by a piece of music may be affected by memories associated with the piece, by the environment it is being played in, by the mood of the person listening and their personality, by the culture they were brought up in: by any number of factors both impossible to control and impossible to quantify. Under such circumstances, it is extremely difficult to deduce what intrinsic quality of the music, if any, created a specific emotional response in the listener. Even when such seemingly intrinsic qualities are found, they are often found to be at least partially culturally dependant.

Several characteristics have been suggested that might influence the emotion of music. For example, according to one study, major keys and rapid tempos cause happiness, whereas minor keys and slow tempos cause sadness, and rapid tempos together with dissonance cause fear. There is also a theory that dissonance sounds unpleasant to listeners across all cultures. Dissonance is to a certain degree culture-dependent, but also appears to be partly intrinsic to the music. Studies have shown that infants as young as 4 months old show negative reactions to dissonance.

Another quantifiable aspect of emotional responses to music is its effect on hormone levels in the body. There is evidence that music can lower levels of cortisol in the body (associated with arousal and stress), and raise levels of melatonin (which can induce sleep). This is outwardly visible in terms of music's ability to relax, to calm, and to give peace. Music is often used in the background hospitals to relax the patients, or in mental hospitals to calm potentially belligerent patients. It also can cause the release of endorphins, and can therefore help relieve pain.
 

Love for and appreciation of music is a universal feature of human culture. It has been theorized that music even predates language. There is no question that music has grown to be an important part of human life, but we can only guess why.

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro04/web2/gvaidya.html