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Transferable method demonstrates rich qualitative data on user experience with digital musical instruments, indicating diverse impacts from participants' backgrounds.
We present the development and demonstration of a transferable method for studying user experience (UX) with digital musical instruments (DMIs) over time. We introduce DMIs, music interaction, stakeholders, and observable experiential aspects of the user-instrument relationship (UIR), grounding the development of our method in theoretical frameworks from human–computer interaction and music technology. We discuss structured evaluation strategies for studying evolving experiential components of the UIR over time, noting the limitations of current approaches. We describe the development and structure of our method before reporting on the initial execution of the method in a limited context. Using a small sample of individuals with diverse musical backgrounds and a compressed time period, we demonstrate how the method can be used to collect rich qualitative data on dynamic aspects of the UIR with an unfamiliar DMI. Results from this initial demonstration suggest that the method is able to capture comparable experiential data from different perspectives and that participants' backgrounds played a central role in their emotional and cognitive experience. We reflect on the limitations and successes of the demonstration, and offer specific suggestions for expanding the method in future, to more widely assess its transferability to different DMIs, participants, and real-world musical contexts.
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Reimer et al. (2025) studied this question.
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