Songwriting uses technology to help the creative process

These assignments are intended to be ambiguous, to encourage some ownership of its interpretation. My initial inquiry focused on how music connects people as a social object. I identified three possible tensions to explore: Mobile vs. Fixed; Creating vs. Consuming; and, Public vs. Private. As I thought about how songs moved through the music ecosystem, I began to evolve this into a study of those who create the songs.

On Sunday night, I was able to interview Five Year Mission, an Indianapolis band with the goal of writing a new song for each of the 80 episodes (including pilots) of the original Star Trek television series. While the impetus for the interview was to support a forthcoming article in Wired‘s GeekDad blog, I devoted a little time asking them about their creative process as it relates to these three tensions.

The group divides up the season among 4 songwriters. The details of how they each approach the assignment vary, but in general they go through a process of watching the episode, re-watching it for notes, composing musical themes, and then writing lyrics. At some point, the result is a demo tape shared with others, for later collaboration.

Personal—Private composition is a product of available time. The band members talked about times when they write music just for their own pleasure, but that time to do so is limited by the number of other things they are doing. Between other jobs, families, and playing in multiple bands, time is scarce for personal projects. When such music is created, it eventually will find its way into a social sphere, such as transitioning from private to public music by uploading to Last.FM.

Creative—Listening is as vital to the creative process as performing. Every songwriter has a unique creative process, but more than one touted the value of iPhones. With voice recording applications, the iPhone allows for quick capture of music and lyrics for later playback and remixing. This is valuable both as a means of sharing (the recordings are used to create demo tapes or send as a raw example of work-in-progress) and for cognitive offloading to help remember ideas. Not everyone has an iPhone; some work with paper, which is as portable but less expensive. Though they work individually at first, the band continues to work through ideas by iterating on the initial demos, sometimes dramatically changing the song. New insights about the songs are learned through live performances and recording sessions as a group.

Mobile—Music making gravitates to familiar spaces. Retreats for working on new songs are constructed by convenience—this is where the equipment is housed—not necessarily for reasons of comfort or solitude. In some cases, due to a combination of time scarcity and pervasive thoughts about music, the songwriting takes place throughout the day in a variety of places. The instrumental work, however, is dependent on having the equipment at hand to perform. Keyboards, drum sets, and even guitars are not easily transferred from place to place. Even to transition from an interview to a practice session in the next room, the setup (equipment and soundproofing) took about 30-40 minutes. Controlled and predictable spaces also accommodate those not in the band, whether it is neighbors or family members, to allow them to anticipate noise levels and change behavior (e.g., leaving the vicinity).

Resources:

1. Original photos by Kevin Makice, taken at a rehearsal (2-13-2011)
2. Interview with Five Year Mission band members (Noah Butler, Andy Fark, Patrick O’Connor, Mike Rittenhouse, and Chris Spurgin), conducted during a rehearsal on February 13, 2011.
3. Five Year Mission website banner (downloaded with permission at http://fiveyearmission.net/ on 2-13-2011)
4. “002/365 Time,” photo by Venn Diagram (downloaded at http://www.flickr.com/photos/venndiagram/4238905532/ on 2-13-2011)

Students in my HCI Design class this semester at the School of Informatics & Computing HCI program are being asked to work up weekly components (research or a grounded concept) to gain experience in making and communicating good design choices. I’m going through the process with them, devoting the minimal amount of time (2-3 hours) that I expect of them each week.

A group of related Twitter accounts appeared during the closing episodes of the most recent season of BSG and have remained somewhat active during the hiatus. In addition to commenting on their respective lives in character, they have replied to each other through Twitter. There is also a related account used to live-tweet the show, an act that doesn’t work out well for the subset who are also fervent about TiVo.

• galentyrol
• karlagathon
• billadama
• KaraThrace
• LeeAdama
• saultigh
• dannabiers
• leoben
• gaiusbaltar
• samanders
• toryfoster
• capricasix
• thefinalone
• cylonhybrid
• 1truecylongod

The use of social networking platform by fans (and critics) of famous and fictional people is nothing new, but it can be a entertaining way for people to share their enthusiasm. Not everyone sees the value of free advertising, as AMC demonstrated to similarly fervent fans of Mad Men.

“The Hollow Moment” (an entry in the Twitter Writing Contest)

This isn’t the first time Twitter and writers have come together. The size constraint has been both incentive and inspiration to compose short, efficient messages on that channel from Day One. Journalists have begun to embrace the medium as a source of information as well as a backchannel for discussing the process of reporting a story. Writers also used Twitter effectively as a way to disseminate news about their winter strike. Recently, someone offered prizes for the best six-word tweet, a la Ernest Hemingway’s “For Sale: Baby shoes, never used.”

Back in December, some writers organized a collaborative story project, Twittories. 140 Twitter authors signed up on a wiki to take one line in the work-in-progress, passing it along to the next person. The effort never completed, as far as I can tell, but a record of the work (“The Darkness Inside“) remains with 86 authors contributing. Plans for a second project died in January with 110 people signed up for the twequel.

There is still time to enter Twitter Writing Contest. Compose your 140-character novelette-ette, and then post the link on the copyblogger site as a comment by 5p Central on Friday, May 23.

If only my dissertation could be written in Twitter.

NOTES:
As people are walking in to what will be a packed room, Ben is pulling up old photo galleries showing profs in the 1960s.

3p start

Creativity support tools: Accelerating discovery and innovation
Ben Shneiderman
* founding director (since ’83) of HCI lab
* his first job was at IU
* gave a talk last night (hmmm … SOI didn’t let us know about it)
* background in databases, growing into a perspective of “20% social psychologist”
* impressed with how the Informatics program is working here
* authored “Designing the User Interface”
* worked on “embedded menus” (which Tim Berners-Lee would eventually call “hot links”)

Spotfire
* gender and age differentiated births in DC … filter by age, birth weight, plurality (how many kids in same birth, i.e. twins) … sociologist not surprised by this data, but interesting for Ben
* not a walk-up-and-use tool … a collaborative tool

Treemap
* stock market, clustered by industry … market falls steeply on Feb 27, 2007 with one exception (small green square in map of red)
* used for discovery … detect insurance fraud, supply chain management, patterns of oil wells (underproduction), newsmap (overview of news stories), gene ontology
* scalability … illustrated by server IP map

Reasserts the human as the discoverer, rather than the machine

SciViz vs. InfoViz

Patternfinder
* patient histories … spotfire-esque controls to filter by age, turn on/off genders … filter by events, like white blood cell count -> purple dots indicate matches in the field … two-criteria -> matches in “ball and chain” to further filter data sets, by stringing together more criteria
* lots of temporal constraints that are difficult to specify otherwise
* 2006 paper published in Visual Analytics conference
* Patternfinder 3 -> flash based, but created new problems … coming to understand what kinds of queries we can do in seconds, minutes or days
- interface for specifying queries (past SQL)
- execution of these things
- display of the result set (find patterns in a large data set very easy)

how do you prove that this leads to discovery?
* surrounded by skeptics who question the HCI endeavor
* http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007

NSF provided $50K for an art exhibit

trying to transform the discipline … visualization is not a far out thing, but something we should do as computer scientists

Creativity Support Tools:
GOALS:
- more people, more creative, more of the time … multi-disciplinary endeavor: software engineers, scientists, architects, product/graphic designers, educators, students, humanists, new media artists, musicians, composers, writers, poets, screenwriters … open the space up (Flash allows for many more people to produce films on YouTube; Dramatica Pro – brilliant implementation of Theory of the Story, by Robert McKie, guru of Hollywood screenwriters … 250 questions, to build structure of his story)
- Looking for “normal science” (evolutionary, product design, engineering, music & art) … Not revolutionary breakthroughs/paradigm shifts … nor impromptu everyday creativity … the things we do can be helped by providing better tools

Key Sources:
* Creativity (1996) [based on interviews with many creative people] and Finding Flow (1997) … Csikszentmihalyi
* Sternberg – Handbook of Creativity (1999) and International Handbook of Creativity (2006) … computer, HCI doesn’t appear in the index -> opportunity for us to make a contribution (how the tools might reshape creativity)
* National academy of science – Beyond Productivity: information technology, innovation and creativity (2003)
* Richard Florida – Rise of the Creative Class (2002) [communities that work with creativity have to work in certain ways - controversial], Flight of the Creative Class (2005)
* eric von Hippel – Democratizing Innovation (2005) [support open source]

1) Structuralists: A plan, method, process
- Dan Couger (1006) reviews 22 “creative problem solving methods” … preparation, incubation, illumination, verification -> French words, 1945 book on a mat mentor, cataloging the creative methods he used
- Treemap solution came as an aha moment (3 days for 6 lines of recursive code after that)
- Atman’s design steps: problem definition/identify need, gather info, generate ideas, modeling, feasibility analysis, evaluation, decision, communication, implementation (from Design thinking research symposium 2003)
- combinatoric exploration, structured problem solving (Russian TRIZ, Arrowsmith), self-help books, business consultants

2) Inspirationalists: Aha, Aha, Aha!
- free associations (brainstorming, ideation, Thesauri, photo collages, random stimuli, inkblots)
- breaking set (getting away to different locations, working on other problems, mediating, sleeping, walking)
- visualization (concept maps/2D networks of ideas, sketching)

3) Situationalists: context, community, collaboration (takes a long time, depend on social group)
- Personal history – family history, parents, siblings, challenging teachers, inspirational mentors
- Consultation – experts and friends, information and empathic support, early/middle/late stages
- Motivations – fame, legacy, admiration, contribution and competition (finding right motivations can facilitate collaboration)
- CREATIVE PEOPLE need: mentors and support/cheerleader (empathic support)

Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity (1993)
1) Domain – “consists of a set of symbols, rules and procedures” (i.e. biology)
2) Field – “the individuals who act as gatekeepers to the domain … decide whether a new idea, performance, or product should be included” – your creativity does not mean anything until you gain recognition from the domain, understand and please members of the field
- most rejections fail to reference the right people in the field
3) Individual – creativity is “when a person … has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion in the relevant domain”
- early stages -> fear of ridicule, stolen ideas
- aggregate individual work, but it happens “in between the ears”

not quite a requirements doc for a computer project, or a research statement, so …

Eight Activities:
* searching and browsing digital libraries – look at your own work and find where Google doesn’t work (Google is great at finding single bits of information)
* consulting with peers and mentors
- facilitate getting the right information (how do we track collaborations)
- spotfire’s success is based on the ability to collaboration
* visualizing data and processes
* thinking by free associations
- expand horizons, make surprising connections
- ex. Arrowsmith
* exploring solutions (what if tools)
* composing artifacts and performances
- starting points: exemplars, templates, processes
* reviewing and replaying session histories
- replay should be a natural part of design
- ctrl-Z allows you to navigate and go back, but you can view/search/send
* disseminating results
- journal publication is slow, email doesn’t help too much
- I would like to send emails to referenced authors (~200) and send paper for review, confirmation
- I would like to know people who cite, download papers and communicate with them

(from “Creating creativity: User interfaces for supporting innovation” – ACM TOCHI, March 2000)

SideViews (Terry and Mynatt 2002) – instead of trial and error, get a picture of many versions at once to select

Guidelines for creativity support tools
- support exploration & collaboration
- support many paths and many styles
- low threshold, high ceiling and wide walls (… and more)
- initiate by exemplars, templates and processes

Evaluation methods:
- ethnographic observational situated … multi-dimensional, in-depth, long-term, case studies (domain experts doing their own work for weeks and months) -> MILCs

MILC
* evaluate socialAction
- focused on integrating statistics and visualization
- 4 case studies, 4-8 weeks (journalist, bibliometrician, terrorist analyst, organizational analyst)
- identified desired features, gave strong positive feedback about benefits of integration
* paper accepted to CHI 2008 (Perer & Shneiderman, 2007)
- very interesting visualization showing senators with bills they voted together … first separates into party lines, then shows cohesion among Democrats as the number of supported bills gets higher
- discovery by Chris Anderson, user of the tool (US News and World Report)

Creativity challenges:
1) evolve new theories and evaluations
2) understand creativity across disciplines

propose innovative:
- individual (creativity support tools)
- group (socio-technical environments) -> need to think about number of collaborations, there are some special things that make social networks succeed

great room for HCI and computer scientists

HCIL 25th Annual Symposium – May 29-30, 2008 (University of Maryland)

Science 1.0 -> reductionist, controlled experiments, replicability, laboratory, natural world … hypothesis testing, predictive hteories, replications
Science 2.0 -> integrated, case studies, validity, situated, made world … hypothesis testing, predictive theories

Abstract:
Creativity Support Tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower diverse users in the sciences and arts to go beyond productivity and be more creative. Potential users include a combination of software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, and architects, as well as writers, poets, musicians, new media artists, and many others. Enhanced interfaces could enable more effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide potent support in goal setting, speedier exploration of alternatives, improved understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results (demos will be shown). For creative endeavors that require composition of novel artifacts (computer programs, engineering diagrams, symphonies, animations, artwork), enhanced interfaces could facilitate rapid exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and enable easy backtracking. This talk provides a framework for systematic study of creativity. Two key issues are (1) Formulation of guidelines for design of creativity support tools (2) Novel research methods to assess creativity support tools. These issues were addressed at the June 2007 Conference on Creativity and Cognition (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007).

Biography:
Ben Shneiderman (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/) at the University of Maryland. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM ) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. Ben is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (1980) and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (4th ed. 2004) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/ . He pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web. His move into information visualization helped spawn the successful company Spotfire http://www.spotfire.com/ . He is a technical advisor for the HiveGroup and ILOG. With S. Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999). His books include Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press), which won the IEEE Distinguished Literary Contribution award in 2004.

Initially, my information stream was purposely small, consisting of family, colleagues, new acquaintances and famous people.

Who tweets, and how do they do it?
Tuesday is the anniversary of Robert Scoble’s first tweet. At a clip of about 14-15 tweets a day on average, the A-list blogger has spent the past year using Twitter to promote his site and share his life with a mass of readers. More amazingly, he manages to converse with many of his 6,891 followers, splitting tweets fairly evenly between posted links and directed replies to other users.

Scoble is on the extreme active side of the user spectrum, but he isn’t the biggest producer of content. According to TwitDir, there are two accounts at the top end of the tweet count, omankoxxx and freshpodcasts. The former has a record 253,031 tweets (and counting) but only two followers and three others being followed. The latter has 209,532 tweets—all published between March 6 and September 5, 2007—broadcasting to 56 followers with no one being followed. Together, these three accounts are representative of three kinds of Twitter members.

A snapshot of Twitter posts to number of followers (source: “Why We Twitter” slideset)

A University of Maryland study published in 2007 captured 1,348,543 tweets from 76,177 members over a two-month period between April and May. The researchers analyzed of both content and network structure of their sample. One of the outcomes was a graph (above) showing the relationship of tweets to followers. Those with high posts and few followers are considered spammers, while those with many followers and few posts are information sources. The authoritative bloggers—sources like Scoblizer and TechCrunch—are high in both areas.

The same study also concluded that there are four common user intentions for members on Twitter:

• Daily Chatter—talk about daily routines and activities.
• Conversations—use of the @ to specifically reference another member
• Sharing Information—inclusion of a pointer referenced in the tweet
• Reporting News—manual and automated reporting of new information, typically through mashups with RSS feeds

This first attempt to officially categorize twitterers through academic analysis offers a good road map toward understanding the signature characteristics of Twitter members and how people make use of their 140 characters to contribute to the information stream.

In August, Nancy White started collecting stories of collaboration, as is the fan wiki. Below are several specific examples of utilization that have appeared since last spring.

Twitter as a news channel
Back in early September, Washington state Republican Jennifer Dunn died. Before people could read about it through traditional media sources, or even Wikipedia, it was reported through Twitter. That is because early adopters are finding it easy to compose a sentence or two to share with others immediately as part of the process of releasing more in-depth reports. The news doesn’t have to be worthy of filing with Associated Press, either. One can learn a lot just by following the daily thoughts of friends. For bloggers and journalists alike, the tweet stream can be a great source of story ideas.

Twitter is also being used to bring writers together. ReportTwitters is an effort to use Twitter to strengthen the community of professional and amateur reporters. Members tweet about the process of getting and filing a story, offering tips and a transparent look behind the bylines. Bloggers Blog is tweeting information about the writers’ strike on a regular basis, adding to the solidarity base by highlighting how widespread the support is for the picket line.

Twitter as an alert system
The low barrier to reporting makes Twitter an ideal channel for alerting a community to danger. Both the recent California earthquake and the rampaging fires in San Diego were well-covered through tweets, providing important information about where the dangers were, what damage had been done, and posting links to deeper resources. The emergency channel extends outside the affected area, giving remote friends and family the opportunity to reach out with thoughts of support and get confirmation that everything is all right. In Bloomington, our twitosphere has its own brush with local danger, and Twitter beat email and blogs to the punch as a means of alerting the community.

Twitter as a virtual conference
In October, I wanted to go to Montreal to attend the third WikiSym. Logistics prevented it from happening, but I appealed to the wiki gurus to get a tweet stream flowing to cover what I was missing. That didn’t work out the way I wanted, but Twitter does make for a great back channel for events. Ground Zero for this use, of course, is the South by Southwest Conference of March 2007 when Twitter won an award in a coming out party that featured big screen displays and a surge in member registrations. In a less formal manner, Twitter is also great for documenting group experiences and annotating walking tours.

Twitter as a marketing tool
Early in the rise of Twitter, the 140-character space has been used effectively to sell books as an affiliate and promote both concerts and new television shows. Most of the blog posts about the service now seem to be related to leveraging Twitter for marketing. There are many different takes on how this is best done, but most agree that the personal nature of the tweet-to-tweet contact—which Ed Dale calls “side-by-side communication“—is a way to reach consumers and potential business partners without raising their defenses. Businesses can announce sales, solicit feedback, and understand customers in a way not easily done through other channels. The highly relevant nature of the tweet instills greater value on marketing content that is voluntarily included in a personal information stream. There is no major spam problem in Twitter because getting a message in that stream requires the reader not only intentionally following an account but also that the producer contribute in a way that does not inspire the same person to remove the account from view.

Twitter as a tool for social change
The tweets aren’t just opportunities to advertise products and services; it is also a chance to express political opinion and persuade others to adopt causes. As Beth Kantor, “Rather than complaining or telling the world you’re eating hot oatmeal, sharing a sense of accomplishment towards a reach goal is inspiring.” Twitter not only provides a simple but flexible space to express one’s self, but it does so in a way that allows each individual reader to control their own consumption of that information. Compare that to Facebook, where too much unwanted information is shared in large social circles. The selective nature of the personal information stream increases the relevance and impact of the tweets that do get read.

Among the early adopters have been politicians. A few presidential candidates are tweeting their campaign trail as they ready for primary season in 2008. Early last summer, Obvious, the company that created Twitter, cracked down on identity squatting on the names of famous people. But there are several legitimate uses by campaigns, most notably Barack Obama and John Edwards. Twitter is a medium that can unite existing community or identify new ones, making it ideal for building constituent support.

Twitter as a help desk
Librarians and educators are looking at Web 2.0 as a potential resource in getting answers to people, but it is also true that Twitter users have been relying on tweets to answer their questions since inception. It is not uncommon to ask about restaurants, web sites, or movie reviews by posting such questions on Twitter. PlusPlusBot is a new communal poll utility that parses pluses and minuses to keep track of ratings of various terms and users. Twitter has also been connected to shared databases through third-party mashups, giving followers access to stored data from the tweet stream.

Twitter as a creative activity
Members think outside the box in the many ways they use Twitter, such as writing only in haiku. My favorite use is Aric McKeown’s community game of hide and seek, inspired by a Richard Connell short story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” Aric spends a day in a local coffee shop, tweeting clues about his location for followers to come find him and earn a little sponsored prize. If there were ever an ideal use for the constraints of a tweet, however, it would be in passing along the wit of the king of dry one-liners, Steven Wright. His short-form humor is perfect , even if someone else is the one posting the material.