Hullabaloo

Hullabaloo was originally called child chairs and represents one of my first attempts at creating a tangible music interface. Child Chairs are simple tangible interfaces that allow children to participate in a music game that tests and increases their musical and memory acuity. Child chairs, renamed Hullabaloo, are prototypes for a new concept called Networked Smart Musical Toys.

Overview and Background

Hullabaloo represents my second attempt at creating a tangible music interface and was designed and conceived at approximately the same time as the Adult Chairs installation. The name Hullabaloo means great noise or excitement and seemed like an appropriate term to describe the device I set out to create.

My first implementation of hullabaloo involved embedding a simple switch into the seat of a wooden chair. This was to allow children to have the ability to control a voice from simple melodies in an overall composition. I hadn't actually thought of using pillows with the chairs at first, thinking that First keyboard circuit mapping perhaps the pillows and chairs could be two separate devices. It worked well but to engage children in a more inviting way I thought an addition or change to this form was needed. As well, since the interaction was to be quite simple, I wanted to create a musical game around the chairs and make this interface as portable as possible. With that in mind I explored additional objects to add to the chairs and eventually I converged on the design of the installation using both the pillows and chairs at the same time. Pillows are an extremely common object in many peoples environment and represent an opportunity to allow for a great deal of aesthetic expression. They are approachable and may either elicit a sense of play or comfort.

Hiroshi Ishii’s Music Bottles were a great early influence on much of this work. In his paper “Bottles as a Minimal Interface to Access Digital Information” with Ali Mazalek, and Jay Lee he writes about the need to “explore the transparency of an interface that weaves itself into the fabric of everyday life”, a statement which fits very well with my overall goals. In selecting pillows as an interface, and this applies to all the interfaces I created, there are some important considerations. First, when we add new digital meanings and functionality to inert physical objects, we need to maintain coherency of the conceptual model in both the physical and digital worlds. This requires seamlessly extending the metaphor and built-in physical affordances of objects to the digital domain (Ishii., 2000). Secondly, when designing the pillows interface it was necessary to identify a fundamental set of interactions that were both appropriate to the task and also compatible with the available sensor technology (Ishii., 2000).

The basic affordance of pillows is to provide support and comfort. In addition to this there are some basic interactions such as squeezing and throwing. Unlike the Music Bottles I was not able to ascertain more sophisticated gestures. As it is I wanted to make the use of the interface as simple as possible, pillows are idea in that regard. I didn’t want the interface to suffer from a greater complexity and be subject to different interpretation. In order to eliminate since the problems that can occur in interpreting the proper use of the interface I opted for a minimal design that would implement only the basic affordance of pillows. This resulted in fixing the pillows with a chair and not as an independent object. Thus the basic affordance is one of comfort.

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