Agents of Jazz (?): Understanding and designing for interaction between improvising musicians

Wireless, wearable sensor technologies provide opportunities to measure, analyse, and interpret human behaviours, emotions, and social signals. Subsequently, a dominant focus in research and industry is the use of these technologies for improving human-computer interactions - to make them more 'natural' or 'human-centred'. Far less attention is given to the opportunities for enhancing human-human interactions. In this talk I will discuss my PhD research, where I investigated how various sensor technologies might contribute towards the understanding and enhancement of co-present musical collaborations. I will describe experiments involving the collection and analysis of physiological, motion, and eye-tracking data from pairs of improvising musicians. I will also discuss The LuminUs - a device for providing performing musicians with live feedback about the gaze of their co-performers, which I developed and evaluated over the course of my PhD.