The widespread adoption of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has made touchscreens a common interface for musical performance. Although new mobile music instruments have been investigated from design and user experience perspectives, there has been little examination of the performers' musical output. In this work, we introduce a constrained touchscreen performance app, MicroJam, designed to enable collaboration between performers, and engage in a data-driven analysis of more than 1,600 performances using the app. MicroJam constrains performances to five seconds, and emphasizes frequent and casual music-making through a social media–inspired interface. Performers collaborate by replying to performances, adding new musical layers that are played back at the same time. Our analysis shows that users tend to focus on the center and diagonals of the touchscreen area, and that they tend to swirl or swipe rather than tap. We also observe that, whereas long swipes dominate the visual appearance of performances, the majority of interactions are short with limited expressive possibilities. Our findings enhance our understanding of how users perform in touchscreen apps and could be applied in future app designs for social musical interaction.

中文翻译：

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使用 MicroJam 对微型触摸屏性能进行数据驱动分析

智能手机和平板电脑等移动设备的广泛采用使触摸屏成为音乐表演的常用界面。尽管已经从设计和用户体验的角度对新的移动乐器进行了调查，但很少对表演者的音乐输出进行检查。在这项工作中，我们引入了一个受限制的触摸屏表演应用程序 MicroJam，旨在实现表演者之间的协作，并使用该应用程序对 1,600 多场表演进行数据驱动分析。MicroJam 将表演限制在五秒内，并通过受社交媒体启发的界面强调频繁和随意的音乐制作。表演者通过回复表演进行协作，添加同时播放的新音乐层。我们的分析表明，用户倾向于关注触摸屏区域的中心和对角线，并且他们倾向于旋转或滑动而不是点击。我们还观察到，虽然长滑动主导了表演的视觉外观，但大多数交互都很短，表达可能性有限。我们的发现增强了我们对用户在触摸屏应用程序中的表现的理解，并可应用于未来的社交音乐交互应用程序设计。