3
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
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.