Francisco Zamorano

I. Introduction

On September 9, 2011, I conducted an online interview with Lucas Werthein. He is originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and he is currently living in New York. He holds a BA in International Politics from PUC-RIO University and an MPS from the ITP program at the New York University (2010). Werthein is interested in creative programming, physical interaction and electronics. He is the the co-creator of EletroAxé – an interactive wearable suit custom made for Carlinhos Brown, a famous Brazilian musician. He also co-created Boom Shakalaka, an electronic Rube Goldberg machine that requires physical pieces for viewers to play.

Werthein’s work –in particular the SambaSurdo project– is relevant to my own research because it deals with similar aspects and concerns: collaboration, music synthesis, the use of space and physical installation. Furthermore, I’m interested on his vision and experience tackling the process of making a thesis project.

 

II. Anticipated questions – Intended areas of conversation

This is the list of intended areas of conversation prepared prior to the interview:
Thesis process
Can you explain how your thesis idea evolved during the thesis year?
How different it ended up being from your what you first imagined?

User experience
What kind of experience where you envisioning for the participants?
Who was your main target? What kind of people?
How did people react when confronted to the installation? Was it how you expected? Any surprises?
How did you deal with different skills and levels of engagement?

Physical installation
What would be the perfect setting for the installation? Why?

Postmortem evaluation
Now after some time, how do you evaluate your project? Any improvements you would perform?
Why do you think that making a sound installation is meaningful?

 

III. Record

The thesis process

Werthein stated that although at the beginning he had no clue what direction he wanted to follow, he was clear about what the components of his project would be: exhibition work, programming and interactivity.

On the meantime of starting his thesis process he was working in collaboration with the Brooklyn-based artist Kyle MacDonald developing a project for Carlinhos Brown, a very popular Brazilian percussionist and singer. His performances are well known for being entertaining and for very large audiences. He has performed several times at the yearly Brazilian Carnaval.

They created an electronic percussion suit for Brown. The suit was equipped with pressure sensors that when hit they would act as percussion instruments, so his own body becomes an instrument when hit. Werthein evaluates this project as very successful as Carlinhos Brown was so pleased with the suit that he even used it in one of his performances at the Carnaval in front of thousands of spectators.

This project was relevant to his thesis project because it confirmed his interest in the cross of music and interactivity. Being faithful to his roots, he decided to work with Samba, the most popular music genre in Brazil, and how it could be re-interpreted through the use of technology.

Inspired by the work of Janet Cardiff –a sound installation artist– he proposed using a set of eight speakers placed in a circular configuration in a room where users could walk inside of the circle and hear a Samba composition. Each one of the speakers had assigned one of the eight tracks (eight instruments) used for the main composition. As users walked closer to a particular speaker (away from the center) all the other instruments would fade out, so they could hear the approached speaker-instrument in solo mode, as a way of understanding the building blocks of Samba.
“As you walk around the room, you really became the instructor or master of percussion…The sounds of Samba are so interesting and very rich, so as you listen to each individual instrument of Samba you realize how really complex it is”

Installation and user experience

According to Werthein, by putting this installation in New York, the reactions were a lot different from what he would get in Rio. Despite New York is a multicultural city, Samba and Brazil are still perceived as something exotic or uncommon, so it was in part a way of breaking the stereotypes associated to his country.

He didn’t think too much about how people would react to the installation before building it, he considers this iteration as a first prototype, a test that allowed him to see how people behaved.

When confronted to the installation, people had many different reactions, some people were interested in understanding the interactivity and how it worked, others were more interested in exploring each sound in more detail. He highlights an interesting phenomenon: “the speakers were hanging from the ceiling, and what happened is that everyone was looking up, looking at where the sound was coming from”.

What he observed here makes him wonder what would happen if the speakers were hidden and people had no visual feedback. He thinks that, as we are a very visual species, this would be very interesting to explore.

Werthein states that when watching people enjoy the installation he feels that he achieved his original intent. For instance, a lot of children interacted with it, and for him it was very interesting to see how kids that grow around technology were totally thrilled: “… for them it was almost like a magic show, they ran around like crazy and they controlled the sound and that was something novel for them. And it is cool to see these kids having this experience because, you know, these kids are already fully surrounded with iPads and technology from the consumer market, but when you put something in front of them that hides the technology and really brings out something they can do with their bodies, and augment the experience with their bodies, they usually go crazy about it”

In terms of scale, he believes that collaboration is very difficult to achieve in a public space, especially if people don’t know each other. In this sense he considers that the experience works much better when there’s a single person exploring it because they are more keen to explore the individual sounds.

When prompted to think about the perfect space for his installation, he states that a museum would be a very interesting place to put it. This would allow to work with better technology and to build a more customized environment to have more control over the physical qualities of sound like echo.

 

IV. Postmortem

Werthein thinks that that SambaSurdo was meaningful because it was a way to take reinterpret a music genre that was created many years ago. Although he didn’t had the direct experience, he is really curious about what the masters of Samba would think if they walked into an installation like this. The main objective was to use these new tools and try to create a different way to experience this wonderful music. He believes it is meaningful because of what it brings: music and cultural richness.

 

V. Conclusions

Interviewing Lucas Werthein was a great experience because I could get a completely different perspective from my own and from my previous interviewees about the process of making a thesis.

I was really intrigued when he stated that collaboration is almost impossible to achieve in the context of a public installation. Having this view from someone that has already tested it empirically sets up new goals for my own exploration and I realize that probably this is one of the main challenges for my project: providing an experience that operates, in some cases, around the boundaries of cultural and social rules.

 

Bibliography

Goins, Waine E. Emotional Response to Music: Pat Metheny’s Secret Story, (New york : The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), 67-69.
Tisch ITP, < http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/ > Accessed October 20, 2011.
Lucas Werthein’s website < http://www.lucaswerthein.com/ > Accessed October 20, 2011.
Kyle McDonald’s website < http://kylemcdonald.net/ > Accessed October 20, 2011.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s website. < http://www.cardiffmiller.com/ > Accessed October 20, 2011.

I. Introduction

On September 23, 2011, I conducted an online interview with Ryan Raffa 1, a designer, artist and musician currently living in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a BS in Business Management and Marketing from Cornell University (2000) and an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons The New School for Design (2011). He is interested in rhythm, sound and the intersection between design and technology. He has recently graduated and his thesis project consisted in a tabletop music sequencer operated through colored acrylic pieces displayed over the surface of the interface. Raffa’s project is relevant to my own research because it deals with similar aspects and concerns: collaboration, music synthesis, and synesthetic relations between sound and visuals. Furthermore, I’m interested on his vision and experience tackling the process of making a thesis project.

II. Anticipated questions – Intended areas of conversation

This is the list of intended areas of conversation prepared prior to the interview:
Thesis process

• Can you explain how your thesis idea evolved during the thesis year?
• How different it ended up being from your what you first imagined?
• What were the things that influenced in the evolution of the idea?
• How broad were your subjects of study/ what different were the users you used for testing? Did you see any difference in how they approached the interface?

User experience and prototyping

• How did the prototypes tests change your preconceived ideas?
• What (in general) were the most valuable aspects of performing the tests?
• How broad were your subjects of study/ what different were the users you used for testing? Did you see any difference in how they approached the interface?

Collaboration

• Was this an important subject for your project? Why?
• How does the individual experience differ from the collective ones?
• What were the main features of RhythmSynthesis in terms of providing a space for collaboration?
• Postmortem evaluation
• Now after some time, how do you evaluate your project? Any improvements you would perform?
• Why do you think your project is relevant?
• What is the most valuable thing you can take out of the thesis process?
• Any “golden phrase” to share with me that I’m starting this process?

III. Record

The thesis process

Ryan Raffa stated that at the beginning he had no clear idea of how the final form would look like. The project started taking shape after attending several conferences and meetings with relevant people. He recalls a meeting at Carnegie Hall about Music Education which changed the direction of his project. After this meeting, his interest in exploring how is sound made, and what are the ways to illustrate that back to people became more clear.

Using the library resources was also an important aspect in the evolution of the idea. He basically checked out anything related to sound: from engineering manuals to art, trying to get as much influence from different areas as possible.

At first he was very focused on the idea of how to use sound to learn about about our everyday’s life, and even though is not an explicit aspect of the final piece, he feels that that original idea is still embedded: “ I ended up building an instrument, an installation” so the original idea comes to light in a more exploratory manner.

User experience and prototyping

When prompted to talk about the things that were most influential in the evolution of the project, Raffa points out the importance of constant prototyping and iterative design. One of the milestones was the moment when he was able to escape from the idea that building a very sophisticated prototype is better than building one with lower resolution. Rapid prototyping allows you to test many aspects in a short period of time, so he created a lot of quick prototypes, sometimes building two or more per week, and some of them were made in less than fifteen minutes.

Consequently, he states the importance of putting those prototypes in front of people without telling them what to do, or without correcting their behaviors when performing a test. Taking this passive position leads to important unexpected discoveries.

In general he was very specific with the people he chose to test the interface, especially in the first stages of evolution of the project. Every time he made a prototype he also created a storyboard or a user scenario to better define the target user for that specific iteration. He had a specific list of people from different backgrounds to test the interface: a designer, a musician, an engineer, a scientist and an educator. Seeking needed a broad sample of people so he could get different feedbacks. “ Not everyone is going to see the project as you do ”, he states.
As important as having a broad range of feedback is the ability to filter all that information : “ …you finally decide what feedback to use and what to disregard ”.

Collaboration

According to Raffa, one of the most important parts of music is the community around it, and how they collaborate and share. Within his project, one of the main goals was to create an environment where non-musicians could feel comfortable and that was still challenging enough to attract more experienced musicians. He thinks that collaboration is becoming every time more important not only in the music realm, and in the future it will dominate the way to operate in every aspect of our lives. With that idea in mind, a musical instrument seemed to him a good way to investigate collaboration.

“ The whole idea of music is a pairing of different instruments or rhythms. Although you can have one person playing different set of beats, where the interesting things come out -like in jazz- is in the introduction of new ideas or new directions, that can only really happen with more than one person”.

Postmortem

Looking back to his project now with more time perspective, Raffa is able to make the distinction between projects and iterations. He states that a project is never done and what is finite are the iterations of that project.

As for the future of the project, he is planning to create a new iteration, because he feels that this current version is already finished. For the ACM conference, for instance, he is going to make something different, incorporating the feedback he has compiled so far.

As a final word to finish the interview, Raffa was asked to share any thoughts that could be helpful for someone that is starting its own thesis project. He instantly responded with the Ten Thousand Hour rule by Malcolm Gladwell : “If you do anything for ten thousand hours, you will become good at it”.

 

IV. Conclusions

Conducting this interview was a great learning experience because now I know much more about the experience of thesis process. Now I have a better overall understanding of what is difficult, what are the key points that need to be addressed in an investigation involving interfaces for sound generation.

Definitely one of the most important points that I can take away from Raffa’s experience is the relevance of having an iterative and constant user-testing process. The fact that it is more valuable to build rapid low-res prototypes to test several different aspects instead of trying to build less but more finished ones is something that I will try to incorporate into my own iterative process.

 

Bibliography

Buxton, William. Sketching user experiences: getting the design right and the right design, (Boston : Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, 2007), 337.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers : The story of success. (New York: New York : Little, Brown and Co.,2008).