This post can’t really do the multitouch soundtrack composition project justice because you can’t play with it yourself. Trust me though, it was a blast to create and a blast to play with.

For my CSCI 588 Design of User Interfaces course we were challenged to create a new user interface for anything we wanted. Along the way we had to do standard software project management tasks like come up with requirements, create prototypes and document our progress - but we also did a slew of user-centered activities like user and task analysis, color analysis, dialogue analysis and the like.

The end result was arguably the best project of the course and helped to land me an A+. The really wonderful thing about the whole experience however, was that it really brought me back to my roots in computer science. Way back when, Dr. David Berque took me in as a lowly high school student and began to teach me the principles of programming and computer software. Dave’s main interest lies in the area of Human-Computer Interaction and I was soon working on an interactive educational project dubbed DEBBIE which eventually became the commercial software DyKnow which has won numerous excellence in educational technology awards. I had recently asked Dave to recommend some HCI books and had thoroughly enjoyed the classic Design of Everyday Things by David Norman. Suffice to say, it was a nice change from “traditional” computer science topics like Operating Systems, Databases and even Software Engineering.

Besides being interesting and challenging, I really had fun throughout the entire project - even when nothing was working - which means that I would probably really enjoy doing this type of work and thinking about these types of problems for a living… always good to know.

The inspiration for the project came from some limited exposure I had to Microsoft Surface while working there during the summer of 2007 and my neighbor Jangwoo Kim who is a professional soundtrack composer. It seemed like a logical pairing given the complexity and variety of physical and virtual interfaces used to create soundtracks. We had a chance to consolidate and simply many hardware and software devices into one system while leveraging the multitouch aspect to maintain the intuitive interaction style of the physical devices like knobs, sliders, etc. that traditional software programs struggle with via the mouse.

So without further ado, I’ll give you two things: a video of our prototype and a zip file containing most of the documentation and analysis we did along with the source code for the project. There’s a lot of good information in there, and if there is anything that anyone would like me to a elaborate upon, please feel free to ask.

Here is the documentation and source code for the project (which was originally based on the MultiKey Demo by cerupCat).

As a side note, you can often find me hanging out in the IRC chatroom #nuigroup on irc.freenode.net. NUIGroup are the people behind the touchlib library used to create this project. I also plan on posting an Instructable on the whole project soon, so stay tuned.