Meeting 1: Toys, Play and Game

In the first meeting we explore different physical toys (balls, frisbees, juggling stick) for their "playability" and introduce the notion of affordances. We talk about the importance of affordances in design in reference to Gibson and Norman work. We discuss the role of learning (babbling) in discovering the playing potential of physical and sonic / musical objects.

Next we introduce Trevor Wishart's "Sounds Fun" book and use several games to learn about sound parameters and social aspects of musical interaction. This also serves as a prepartion to Sound Painting, to be done later on during the meeting.

The importance of mental models and patterns (schemata) versus cognitive processing is demonstrated using the game of tic-tac-toe. We introduce the idea of chance and indeterminacy as a way to create variations in musical materials. This is demonstrated in two examples of chance operations- Mozart Dice Games and Essel's Lexikon Sonata. We then discuss the role of variability in traditional music versus contemporary culture.

The experience gathered allows us to discuss what we learned so far: what are the differences between toys, play and competition? How "playability" potential of a toy is discovered and why the interplay of perception and production is needed to developing ways of playing? We ask whether competition is necessary to distinguish games for play, and what aspects along the toy-play-game axis result in feelings of fun?

At the final part of the first meeting we proceed to discuss the differences between improvisation, composition and games, and introduce the concept of conducted improvisation. We learn some of the basic conducting gestures of Walter Thompson's Sound Painiting, and perform few short musical improvisations.