On the Design of a Musical Flow Machine
François Pachet · 2004
This paper addresses the issue of designing interactive systems that create flow experiences in users. I first describe an interactive musical system called the Continuator, which is able to learn the musical style of users in an agnostic, continuous fashion. I then describe experiments conducted with professional musicians and with 3 to 5-year old children and the Continuator. I show that these interactions are -- almost - typical of the Flow phenomenon, as introduced by Csikszentmihalyi. I then focus on the abstraction of the design principles behind the Continuator and propose the notion of Reflective Interactive System as a class of applications which trigger Flow experiences. Based on the analysis of the various psychological experiments conducted so far, I identify the issue of flexibility in interaction protocols as a crucial step to enhance the efficiency of Reflective Systems as we envisage them today.