In the Wild: Evaluating Collaborative Interactive Musical Experiences in Public Settings

Abstract

This chapter describes a mixed-method approach that was adopted for evaluating the audience interaction with a collaborative interactive music system entitled Polymetros. Designed for broad audiences, Polymetros aims to enable users without formal musical training to experience collaborative music making. The presented approach aims to cater for audience evaluations that take place in the real-world context of a public exhibition and was applied to a study conducted in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Besides reflecting on general motivations for adopting and combining different methods to assess technology-mediated public creativity, the main focus of this chapter is to provide a detailed account of how the specific contextual demands and particular evaluation objectives of the reported study were incorporated into the methodological approach. After summarising the study results, several interesting links between findings derived from using different methods are examined indicating the value of triangulation. This leads to a discussion how a bespoke mixed-method approach can contribute to the understanding of such a complex, interactive multi-user scenario in public settings.