SmartDrone: An Aurally Interactive Harmonic Drone

Travis C MacDonald, James Hughes, and Barry MacKenzie

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

• Year: 2020
• Location: Birmingham, UK
• Pages: 483–488
• DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4813488 (Link to paper)
• PDF link

Abstract:

Mobile devices provide musicians with the convenience of musical accompaniment wherever they are, granting them new methods for developing their craft. We developed the application SmartDrone to give users the freedom to practice in different harmonic settings with the assistance of their smartphone. This application further explores the area of dynamic accompaniment by implementing functionality so that chords are generated based on the key in which the user is playing. Since this app was designed to be a tool for scale practice, drone-like accompaniment was chosen so that musicians could experiment with combinations of melody and harmony. The details of the application development process are discussed in this paper, with the main focus on scale analysis and harmonic transposition. By using these two components, the application is able to dynamically alter key to reflect the user's playing. As well as the design and implementation details, this paper reports and examines feedback from a small user study of undergraduate music students who used the app.

Citation:

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{NIME20_92,
 abstract = {Mobile devices provide musicians with the convenience of musical accompaniment wherever they are, granting them new methods for developing their craft. We developed the application SmartDrone to give users the freedom to practice in different harmonic settings with the assistance of their smartphone. This application further explores the area of dynamic accompaniment by implementing functionality so that chords are generated based on the key in which the user is playing. Since this app was designed to be a tool for scale practice, drone-like accompaniment was chosen so that musicians could experiment with combinations of melody and harmony. The details of the application development process are discussed in this paper, with the main focus on scale analysis and harmonic transposition. By using these two components, the application is able to dynamically alter key to reflect the user's playing. As well as the design and implementation details, this paper reports and examines feedback from a small user study of undergraduate music students who used the app. },
 address = {Birmingham, UK},
 author = {MacDonald, Travis C and Hughes, James and MacKenzie, Barry},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.4813488},
 editor = {Romain Michon and Franziska Schroeder},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {July},
 pages = {483--488},
 publisher = {Birmingham City University},
 title = {SmartDrone: An Aurally Interactive Harmonic Drone},
 url = {https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2020/nime2020_paper92.pdf},
 year = {2020}
}