DESIGN | WYSIATIMUSIC

B-Audio

Methodolgy

Card sorting surveys were conducted to identify musical terms participants associate with ‘balance’, ‘stability’ and ‘spatiality’. Word cloud representations of the musical terms showing their frequency of usage in the particular category were constructed.

The survey results were filtered and analysed to extract the most prominent Audio descriptors. The data has been presented as word clouds for each of the schemas 'Verticality', 'Spatiality' and 'Stability'.

Stability Terms survey participants associated with 'Stability'	Verticality Terms survey participants commonly associated with 'Verticality'	Center - Periphery Terms survey participants commonly associated with 'Containers'

Design Assets

Once the user data was collected and sorted, various schematics to best represent the mappings between the above descriptors and the corresponding schematic were constructed. An incremental approach was followed and primary descriptors of 'Continuity' and 'Order' were chosen as the most representative of the the 'Stability' and 'Spatiality' schemas.

Various factors affected the design choices -

Technical complexity and feasibility. The idea here was to maximise the interaction value while making sure the experience is viable and tangible on a web-based interface.
- The abstraction of the human body structure was required to simplify the design and address 'stability' with more accuracy.
- Balance type schematics such as - Twin-Pan / Point Balance were experimented with and design artefacts were generated to address each schema type.
Iterating various design approaches and simplifying and augmenting certain aspects to improve the representations and mapping incrementally.
Each design iteration served as an input to a corresponding implementation, which was evaluated and correctional feedback was incorporated into next to design artefacts.