Full-body navigation of Harmony Space

Novice improvisers typically get stuck on ‘noodling’ around individual chords, partly because they are oblivious to larger scale harmonic pathways.

Harmony Space enables harmonic relationships to be represented as 2D spatial phenomena such as trajectories. When users move through the space they hear the sounds corresponding to the different locations.

Our working hypothesis is that providing tactile guidance around Harmony Space will improve musicians’ knowledge of larger scale harmonic elements such as chord progressions and thereby improve their improvisation skills.

An open research question we are investigating is whether full-body exploration of Harmony Space, for example moving around a large floor projection (20' x 30' - see image to the left), brings any benefits over using a mouse and keyboard to interact with Harmony Space on a computer monitor.