Mid-fidelity prototype — Final Major Project
Designers: Alex Newson, Sebastian Ervi
Stage of the project: Evaluation and refinement
Last week, we validated the core concept of our prototype. We now wanted to iterate on it in a way to sustain connection between artist and audience throughout the whole concert experience.
Preparing the prototype
To iterate on last week, we had the idea of implementing active engagement of audience members not only at the beginning of the concert, but also between songs during the concert.
This is how we thought about a new structure:
- The artist introduces themselves, telling about their journey as a musician, why they are performing tonight specifically and encouraging the audience to introduce themselves as well.
- A collective warm-up is conducted by the artist, who shares their personal warm-up habits after having formed a circle with everybody. The artist is encouraged to teach lyrics and rhythmic parts of the songs they are about to perform. Physical warm-up and other, non-traditional ways to warm-up are also encouraged, as long as they are part of the artist’s warm-up ritual.
- Performing the songs. At this stage, the audience should already know some parts of the songs. The artist is encouraged to repeat mini-warm-ups between songs to build tension and lead to a peak moment of the concert.
- Ending of the concert. The artist is encouraged to share their feelings, thank the audience for their active participation, and talk about the future of their musical journey. The artist is also invited to give a sheet of the realised warm-up for the audience to keep as a memory of the concert.
In order to allow artists to design their own participatory elements prior to the show, we designed a kit composed of instructions, recommendations and templates to do so.
I reached out to artists on London Musicians networking groups on Facebook and posted a public message to request unestablished artists to collaborate with us. We were glad to notice that our project seemed highly appreciated by many artists — jumping back-and-forth with 20 message requests and comments was time-consuming, but worth it!
This is how we met Kelly Erez, a singer-songwriter, life coach and vocal coach. She had already been looking for similar ideas and has been seeking to get better at connecting with an audience. She also went to LCC for her undergraduate degree!
Alex and I met Kelly through Zoom a day before the testing session to introduce her to the kit we designed. On my end, I also set up the Reaper software with my external sound card to prepare a microphone and the backing tracks that Kelly was about to send me.
Testing
The testing session was run in the Black Box room of the university building, with the use of rented lights (The Kit Room at LCC) and speakers (Sound Arts department of LCC). The audience — 13 participants — was exclusively composed of MA User Experience Design this time, but mixed of 1st and 2nd year students.
After having set up lights and sound, Kelly and I prepared some warm-up cards to be given to the audience after the show. Kelly then introduced herself to the crowd, warmed-up with them and performed 3 songs, while introducing personal objects, stories, and explanations of her lyrics between the songs. She pro-actively helped the audience to sing lyrics on the last song, which worked really well.
We ran into audio issues such as a lack of reverb and a slight delay, which ultimately led to abandon the use of the microphone during songs, which Kelly managed to perform without it.
We evaluated the prototype in the same way as last week. This time, the points were placed much higher during and after the performance, showing that the connection is maintained. Though, we can still see a dip after the warm-up on some maps.
The audience generally liked the sharing of personal stories, with “props” associated with each song. They also enjoyed learning the lyrics to a song during warm-up, which they sung together at the end. Some forgot the lyrics as it was at the end of the concert. The warm-up was intimate, interactive and fun to do according to written comments. Although the transition between the warm-up and the songs could be improved.
We also asked Kelly about her own thoughts about the kit she used. She really appreciated the concept and the ideas behind it, but didn’t fully understand everything about the kit, especially the storyboard templates and the bottom part of the cue cards dedicated to personal notes. Overall, she felt that warming-up together and sharing stories helped facilitating the connection we were looking for.
What I learnt
- Interactivity and the share of personal stories throughout the concert seem to work well to maintain a connection after the initial warm-up.
- Teaching lyrics of songs beforehand creates familiarity with the songs before the concert starts and engages the audience to sing along — which seems to create connection well! But teaching complex lyrics for a song performed at the end of the concert didn’t help the audience to memorise the lyrics.
- Giving the cards at the end of the performance didn’t seem to affect the experience. We might want to focus on other elements for the final outcome.
- The kit might need clearer instructions if we pursue with that idea.
- Leaving more time to set up audio next time. Using a digital interface with an external sound card might not always be a good idea for live music because of delay.
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