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Music is an evolutionarily deep-rooted, abstract, real-time, complex, non-verbal, social activity. Consequently, interaction design in music can be a valuable source of challenges and new ideas for HCI. This workshop will reflect on the latest research in Music and HCI (Music Interaction for short), with the aim of strengthening the dialogue between the Music Interaction community and the wider HCI community. We will explore recent ideas from Music Interaction that may contribute new perspectives to general HCI practice, and conversely, recent HCI research in non-musical domains with implications for Music Interaction. We will also identify any concerns of Music Interaction that may require unique approaches. Contributors engaged in research in any area of Music Interaction or HCI who would like to contribute to a sustained widening of the dialogue between the distinctive concerns of the Music Interaction community and the wider HCI community will be welcome.

Tonal harmony is widely considered to be the most technical and complex part of music theory. Consequently harmonic skills can be hard to acquire. Furthermore, experience of the flexible manipulation of harmony in real time generally requires the ability to play an instrument. Even for those with instrumental skills, it can be difficult to gain clear insight into harmonic abstractions. The above state of affairs gives rise to substantial barriers not only for beginners but also for many experienced musicians. To address these problems, Harmony Space (Holland et al. 2009) is an interactive digital music system designed to give insight into a wide range of musical tasks in tonal harmony, ranging from performance and composition to analysis. Harmony Space employs a principled set of spatial mappings to offer fluid, precise, intuitive control of harmony. These mappings give rise to sensory-motor and music-theoretic affordances that are hard to obtain in any other way. As a result, harmonic abstractions are rendered amenable to concrete, visible control by simple spatial manipulation. In the language of conceptual metaphor theory, many relationships in tonal harmony become accessible to rapid, universal, low-level, robust human inference mechanisms using image schemata such as containment, contact, centre-periphery, and source-path-goal. This process is more rapid, and imposes far less cognitive load, than slow, abstract symbolic reasoning. Using the above principles, several versions of Harmony Space have been de-signed to exploit specific interaction styles for different purposes. We note some key variants, such as the desktop version (Holland 1994), the camera tracked version (Holland et al. 2009), while focusing principally on the most recent version, Song Walker (Holland et al. 2011), which employs whole body interaction. Preliminary results from a study of the Song Walker system are outlined, in which both beginners and expert musicians undertook a range of musical tasks involving the performance, composition and analysis of music. Finally, we offer a discussion of the limitations of the current system, and outline directions for future work

A fundamental assumption in the fields of human-computer interaction and usability studies is that interfaces should be designed for ease of use, with a few exceptions such as the trade-off with long-term power. In this chapter it is argued that in music interaction the situation is far more complex, with social, technical, artistic, and psychological reasons why difficulty is in some cases a good thing, and in other cases a necessary evil. Different aspects of static and time-varying difficulty in music interaction are categorised. Some specific areas in which difficulty seems to be inextricably linked to positive aspects of music interaction are described. This is followed by discussion of some areas in which difficulty is undesirable and, perhaps, avoidable. Examples are drawn from music interaction research in general and from other chapters of this book in particular.

The Haptic Bracelets are a system designed to help people learn multi-limbed rhythms (which involve multiple simultaneous rhythmic patterns) while they carry out other tasks. The Haptic Bracelets consist of vibrotactiles attached to each wrist and ankle, together with a computer system to control them. In this chapter, we report on an early empirical test of the capabilities of this system, and consider de-sign implications. In the pre-test phase, participants were asked to play a series of multi-limb rhythms on a drum kit, guided by audio recordings. Participants’ per-formances in this phase provided a base reference for later comparisons. During the following passive learning phase, away from the drum kit, just two rhythms from the set were silently 'played' to each subject via vibrotactiles attached to wrists and ankles, while participants carried out a 30-minute reading comprehen-sion test. Different pairs of rhythms were chosen for different subjects to control for effects of rhythm complexity. In each case, the two rhythms were looped and alternated every few minutes. In the final phase, subjects were asked to play again at the drum kit the complete set of rhythms from the pre-test, including, of course, the two rhythms to which they had been passively exposed. Pending analysis of quantitative data focusing on accuracy, timing, number of attempts and number of errors, in this chapter we present preliminary findings based on participants’ sub-jective evaluations. Most participants thought that the technology helped them to understand rhythms and to play rhythms better, and preferred haptic to audio to find out which limb to play when. Most participants indicated that they would pre-fer using a combination of haptics and audio for learning rhythms to either mo-dality on its own. Replies to open questions were analysed to identify design is-sues, and implications for design improvements were considered.

Whole Body Interaction appears to be a good fit of interaction style for some categories of application domain, such as the motion capture of gestures for computer games and virtual physical sports. However, the suitability of whole body interaction for more abstract application domains is less apparent, and the creation of appropriate whole body interaction designs for complex abstract areas such as mathematics, programming and musical harmony remains challenging. We argue, illustrated by a detailed case study, that conceptual metaphor theory and sensory motor contingency theory offer analytic and synthetic tools whereby whole body interaction can in principle be applied usefully to arbitrary abstract application domains. We present the case study of a whole body interaction system for a highly abstract application area, tonal harmony in music. We demonstrate ways in which whole body interaction offers strong affordances for action and insight in this domain when appropriate conceptual metaphors are harnessed in the design. We outline how this approach can be applied to abstract domains in general, and discuss its limitations.

Why develop online resources for problem-based learning? PBL is a pedagogy which requires students to seek resources for themselves. Providing students with easily accessible resources must surely run counter to the philosophy. PBL is first and foremost a strategy for learning; its overriding purpose is to assist learners to acquire, not only factual knowledge, but the transferable learning, critical thinking, and reflective skills necessary for professional life. PBL is thus ideally suited to the education of nurses.In nurse education a tension exists between the need to develop critical thinking skills and the requirement to acquire, simultaneously, the clinical proficiencies set by the Nursing and Midwifery Council. Meeting these demands within the time frame of an undergraduate nursing programme presents a considerable challenge. This monograph details the journey of the SONIC project group as they met this challenge, maximising student study time by combining the benefits offered by PBL with online resources targeted to topics which nursing students traditionally find difficult. At journey’s end their resources, offered freely, without the barrier of complex entry procedures, fit not only with the programmes run by the four partner institutions and other Schools of Nursing but also with programmes offered by other health care disciplines