Moving over to working with multiple bodies hasn’t been easy since we have needed to work over Zoom for a couple of days. We can’t try out movements together. We can discuss them, and then we need to get another person to try out the movement with me to see if it works. It is not the same as us digging deep into what it is we want out of the interaction and how we can make it a social interaction.
The first sketch we made was with one person controlling the pitch and one controlling the volume, which we then showed for the coaching.
One feedback that we received was that it isn’t really a sociality to the interaction. It is more like two persons having a task each, and they can’t affect each other. And I don’t know how we can’t have seen it because it feels so apparent when pointed out. So now we need to find a way to let both persons’ movements control the expression collectively.
Another change that we will do is to change the movement. Using the wrists to control the frequency and volume is not working out as we want. The kinaesthetic feeling is off. It doesn’t feel balanced. For now, we have used just one arm on each person, and we think this makes it hard to get it to feel like a nice movement. The way it is now kind of stretches the side of your torso. To test new movement, we made a new body storming where we aimed to use both sides of the body. We found some movements that felt nice and where you feel that you can control your movement in a smooth and easy way.
One movement that felt much better when doing it for a while was this position.
I think this movement feels nice as long as you are able to move the arms. Otherwise, it will quite quickly be tiring, but it will work because we will not use it as a fixed pose for our purpose. We want it to be a living movement that you will use together with the other person.
For the volume control, we are thinking of using the whole body and working with the positions of the shoulders. We want to separate the frequency and volume control so they don’t use the same body parts since we found it confusing when we used the wrist for both. It wasn’t always clear which person controlled what. We also feel that it would be interesting to test something that isn’t using hands or arms since most interactions today are made for the hands, and using arms instead feels like just taking the second-best, and perhaps there is something in not using your arms or hands.
I think that we will try to test these movements instead.