Hi there, so this is one of two videos that I'm producing supplementary to my NIME conference submission
In this one I'm just going to talk about the
method and the motivation behind the Excello project and in the second one
I'm giving more of a hands-on demonstration of the features and the design of the system and how to use it
In this one I will talk about some existing programs that I took motivation for and analyzed before building Excello,
how that informed the objectives behind Excello and then I'll briefly mention the design and the implementation process but won't go into the
actual details of its design and then I'll briefly talk about how it was evaluated
First of all when I talk about making a music composition and notation system in spreadsheets
the initial reaction is normally
why is this something that I want to explore when there are more efficient interfaces out there designed specifically for music
Spreadsheets are such powerful tools for data
display and manipulation and storage in both a human and computer readable form that they kind of have the potential for
computation beyond finances and the standard uses of spreadsheets. So I wanted to explore them being used for a more creative means
So many people are so used to spreadsheets and they are just so ubiquitous that
why not build on that existing knowledge and skills that people have and provide an interface for them to be able to
play around and experiment with music without having to learn something new
So looking at some existing programs that have spreadsheet-like features
first of all a simple example just called Spreadsheet Music
where the spreadsheet is used as the input for a drum loop
here we can see that yes, it does use a spreadsheet
but what I didn't really like about this was the fact that the spreadsheet was simply just used for data entry
It might as well just be an array and a separate program has to be run anyway, it's not integrated
and one issue that
I had with this which we then explored with the rest of the project is the idea of
abstracting time away from the grid. So here we can see that a particular axis is tied with being time
and when we use spreadsheets, this is not the case
The spreadsheet is a blank canvas and whilst we may
end up with certain axes being time or categories or whatnot
it's completely free for the users to do what they wish with and we wanted to keep this so that the spreadsheet in both dimensions
continued to be free for secondary notation and other working out
and finally, I'm going to talk about the scalability of these other programs, this one arbitrarily scalable
there's no kind of constraints to how large or in which directions the music can span
Secondly, Chris Nash's Manhattan
Debatable as to whether or not we consider this to be a spreadsheet,
it kind of has rows and columns of cells
It's all a kind of integrated system, but again, we have one axis tied with time
so the rows are the time steps and the columns are the different instruments
but the way in which notes are placed within cells and the notation used
did bear some influence on Excello
Next is Advait Sarkar's Sheet Music
So this is a fully kind of integrated spreadsheet system
and what's nice about this is it explores the idea of abstracting time away from the grid
In this particular case it does so using a global tick variable which can be referred to in functions
but the problem with this is unless you're using simple loops or small pieces of music
it would become very complicated to program everything in relation to this tick variable
So we wanted to explore a different solution to this, but
appreciating the abstraction of time
Finally a fairly fun example of computer music is Al-Jazari
It's not a spreadsheet but it is a 2D grid and rather than having numbers or figures within the grid
we can see that we have blocks and these blocks have different heights and colors
And then these little blue robots are programmed to navigate around the grid using the instructions in the speech bubble above their head
So they move around the grid and
as they pass into a block they will play a note and that note is dependent on the properties of the block
It's clearly not a spreadsheet
but we really like the idea of having the movement of agents and the
distribution of data within the grid
as a system for abstracting time away from the grid. It allows you to still put whatever you want within the cells
and gives you a way of navigating and creating pathways where music is played
This particular example not scalable, we can see it's just a kind of finite domain, but
definitely took inspiration from this for Excello
So looking at these, and thinking about Excello,
the main objectives that we had were for it to be in a spreadsheet and for it to be inclusive to the spreadsheet
not just a separate program that used a spreadsheet as data
For it to abstract time away from the grids
so you could have more idiomatic spreadsheet and flexible use of spreadsheets
and for it to be arbitrary scale in that it's not
confined to a specific region of the spreadsheet
In my other video I'll go into the design and implementation in more detail with demonstrations, but
having created an initial prototype we performed participatory design using 21 users
who were given an introductory session where they were taught how to use Excello and given some brief tasks to do
We received some feedback from this but the users continued to use it over the following months
From this we gained lots of feedback and this informed many design decisions and
implementation of new features
For the evaluation the same users were used for summative evaluation, but we also
converted a large corpus of MIDI files into spreadsheets for performance within Excello
and the fact that all of these were convertible
demonstrated the completeness of the notation that Excello uses
The users were given a
brief transcription and composition task, after this we had them
analyze the features that have come out of the partcipatory design to assess the success of that
In order to make a slightly more direct comparison, they carried out cognitive dimensions of notation questionnaires
Which made comparisons to Sibelius which was an interface that most of the users had used before
an interface which is specific for music composition and not at all to spreadsheets
I hope this gives a little more context to the project
I'd encourage you to check out the video where I demonstrate how to use Excello to get a feel for how it works
and if you're interested in reading more do refer to the
NIME 2020 conference submission