research-article

Supporting traditional music-making: designing for situated discretion

Authors:

Ahmed Y. Ahmed,

Tom RoddenAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

Pages 127 - 136

https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145227

Published: 11 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

An ethnographic study of Irish music sessions in pubs elaborates the collaborative work involved in making traditional music. Central to this distinctive achievement is the sequencing of tunes so that they hang together and combine to form discrete "sets", which rely on a shared knowledge of musical repertoires. Our study shows how musicians develop this musical knowledge through the use of digital resources and social networks. It also reveals how musicians construct and make use of various paper props to help bring their knowledge to bear in the actual in vivo course of a session so as to maintain the moral order of making music together in a demonstrably traditional way. The social demands of musical "etiquette" sensitise CSCW to the need to design technologies to support the "situated discretion" that is essential to traditional practices. We elaborate this notion through a discussion of requirements for technologies that bridge between online resources and the collaborative sequencing of tunes during performance.

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Cited By

Suh MYoungblom ETerry MCai CKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)AI as Social Glue: Uncovering the Roles of Deep Generative AI during Social Music CompositionProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445219(1-11)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445219
Benford SMansfield PSpence JKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)Producing LivenessProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445125(1-16)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445125
McGrath SGroß-Vogt KHöldrich R(2020)Breaking the workflow: Design heuristics to support the development of usable digital audio production toolsProceedings of the 15th International Audio Mostly Conference10.1145/3411109.3411133(130-137)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2020
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Index Terms

Supporting traditional music-making: designing for situated discretion
1. Human-centered computing

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

February 2012

1460 pages

ISBN:9781450310864

DOI:10.1145/2145204

General Chairs:
Steven Poltrock
Boeing Research & Technology
,
Carla Simone
University of Milano-Biccoca
,
Program Chairs:
Jonathan Grudin
Microsoft Research
,
Gloria Mark
University of California, Irvine
,
John Riedl
University of Minnesota

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 11 February 2012

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CSCW '12

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SIGCHI

CSCW '12: Computer Supported Cooperative Work

February 11 - 15, 2012

Washington, Seattle, USA

Acceptance Rates

CSCW '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 164 of 415 submissions, 40%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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CSCW '25

Sponsor:
sigchi

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

October 18 - 22, 2025

Bergen , Norway

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Suh MYoungblom ETerry MCai CKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)AI as Social Glue: Uncovering the Roles of Deep Generative AI during Social Music CompositionProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445219(1-11)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445219
Benford SMansfield PSpence JKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)Producing LivenessProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445125(1-16)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445125
McGrath SGroß-Vogt KHöldrich R(2020)Breaking the workflow: Design heuristics to support the development of usable digital audio production toolsProceedings of the 15th International Audio Mostly Conference10.1145/3411109.3411133(130-137)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411109.3411133
Avila JHazzard AGreenhalgh CBenford S(2019)Augmenting Guitars for Performance PreparationProceedings of the 14th International Audio Mostly Conference: A Journey in Sound10.1145/3356590.3356602(69-75)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2019
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Lepri GMcPherson AHarrison SBardzell SNeustaedter CTatar D(2019)Making Up InstrumentsProceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3322276.3322353(113-126)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2019
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Avila JHazzard AChamberlain AGreenhalgh CBenford SCunningham SPicking R(2018)An AI-Based Design Framework to Support Musicians' PracticesProceedings of the Audio Mostly 2018 on Sound in Immersion and Emotion10.1145/3243274.3275381(1-5)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2018
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Weir D(2017)Singing the critical life: folk, place, and the palimpsest of rhythms in the beat of the cityJournal of Organizational Ethnography10.1108/JOE-01-2017-00046:1(46-59)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2017
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