3

Federica Bucchieri
Aikaterini Batziakoudi
Julia Valeria Lopez Rojas
Patricia Vera Hernandez

MusicHub

Music

Final Object

MusicHub creates different branches from a tune to help music creators to experiment with different versions, sounds, effects and results, in order to reach the final draft of the project.

Final Concept

MusicHub offers music creators a way to explore creativity within their tunes by managing and organizing branches in their projects. It allows them to create, modify, delete and merge different branches of a track. Each branch represents a variation of the original track, so the creators can test different effects, notes or any modification without losing any previous settings or configurations. Branches can be reordered, hidden if inactive and merged to obtain the final version of the new hit.

Design Diagram

User Profile

Our target users are people who work on music post-production and mixing. They can be either amateur musicians or professionals, and they can work either individually or in a collaborative setting as members of a music band. They experiment with sound, they record multiple versions of the same song and they apply and test different sound effects to the record tracks to achieve the desired result. They have access to music software, they own producing equipment and they have at least basic knowledge on music theory.

Persona:
Bob, 24, Guitarist in a Indie/Rock Band.

Bob is the guitarist of the Villager band, and takes care of the band songs' post-editing, although he has a basic knowledge of music theory.

Persona:
Alice, 35, Movie Soundtracks Composer.

With a background in music composition, Alice is a professional soundtrack composer that loves to experiment with new sounds.

Extreme character:
Kate, 29, Music Producer.

Single-sided deafness (SSD) music producer that works for different artists. She has impediments in testing the spatial distribution of sound output.

Storyboard

Alice creates a new empty branch by activating the tool, clicking on the track and dragging the pointer to select the part to be divided in branches

Alice wants to copy the content of the original branch into the new one. She drags and drop the selected part of the track to the new empty branch

Bob's band has to record the live version of the song. They create a new empty branch for every instrument track and start recording on the new branch

Bob creates a sub-branch to experiment with the guitar solo. After recording it again, he opens the radial menu by right-clicking to rename it.

Kate has to create a branch for every track in order to set every sound direction to “Right”, for her to be able to listen to the song entirely.

From the radial menu, Kate finally selects "Merge" and all the active branches are going to be merged together in the final version of the soundtrack.

What we changed from the first design cycle

Process

We simplified our tool from the interaction point of view. We stopped and evaluated every single action and the corresponding interaction. We aimed at making our branching tool more interactive and intuitive. Thanks to the Design Walkthrough we addressed the majors breakdowns, recreated a Scenario based on the same Personas and achieved better interaction mechanisms and video prototype.

Design

We transformed the tool activation into the activation of the “Branching mode”. While in this mode, we exploited intuitive and common interactions like click, holding shift for multiple selection and drag&drop, to add functionalities to our tool without losing its ease of use. We also changed the way branches are represented to convey their status, ideating a new radial menu to interact with them.