Exploring the potential of mobile technology and NFC for creating music collaboratively

Abstract: Nowadays, mobile devices offer a wide variety of features and sensor capabilitiesthat can be applied into everyday problems. This is being used by the commu-nity in order to provide more intuitive tools that facilitate users to tackle theseproblems. In this thesis, I present my work which aims at providing an afford-able, non-intrusive, easy to use and intuitive tool that enables users withoutany musical background to create music collaboratively and enjoy this activityby using NFC enabled mobile devices and NFC tags. I introduce the "Rela-tive Position Awareness" which is utilized to allow users to create a music piecebased on the relative position of the devices. To do that, I implement a proto-type that includes Near Field Communication (NFC) and study whether NFCis a suitable technology for supporting the positioning awareness system. Inaddition, I also study the interactions that occur while users are collaborativelycreating music pieces. I run several user studies that indicate my prototype issuitable for supporting music creation collaborative activities, that NFC pro-vides a high level of accuracy when it comes to support the relative positioningsystem and that the prototype fosters social interaction among the users. Partof the results from this research effort have been presented in Fifth Workshopon Ubiquitous Music (V UbiMus) and can be found in Exploring the potentialof mobile technology for creating music collaboratively [1]