Enchantment Under the Sea: An Intelligent Enviroment for User Friendly Music Mixing

Abstract

Disc Jokeys (DJs) generally mix music in a confined isolated space. This can make the DJ have depression sentiments and it can also difficult the DJ's understanding of his public. We present Enchantment Under The Sea: a new intelligent environment that allows the disc jokey to roam freely, interact directly with his audience, receive informative feedback about the public's social interactions, while also respecting the DJs privacy concerns. The music interface is controlled using Microsoft's wireless touch mouse with ubiquitous gestures that resemble dance moves. The music mixing interface is displayed on the walls of the event, where two different display modalities are enabled: open interface, in which the public can observe all of the DJ's decisions with the music mixing interface and also actively give music suggestions to the DJ. And a closed interface, where all the music controllers are mapped to sea animals, that only the DJ knows the mapping to, thus providing privacy to the DJ's work. The public's social interactions are measured with sonar sensors whose data is provided to the DJ through the musical interface. We report results of a controlled usability inspection.