audiocubes /// smart cubes for audiovisual creation

We were really impressed when receiving a message from Samantha Ewart, a PhD student at the School of Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney (Australia). She is an unusual customer of the AudioCubes or the “Music Cubes” as she calls them in her work.

Samantha started using the Percussa AudioCubes for a project^[1] within her Music Degree to help distract and entertain adolescent patients at the Children’s Hospital Westmead. She renamed the AudioCubes to the Music Cubes, to make it easier for the kids to grasp the meaning of them.

Together with Dr Garth Paine, she researched at the Department of Adolescent Medicine of the Children’s Hospital Westmead whether the AudioCubes could be innovative stimulation (visually and aurally) for the adolescent patients. To research this they used the AudioCubes together with Ableton Live and Max/MSP.

The Music Cubes Poster (Samantha Ewart, PhD student at the School of Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney) Supervisor: Dr. Garth Pain

She says: “I found that the AudioCubes were received very positively for young people in hospital because they could interact individually or in a group. This can help promote well-being as it promoted socialisation. The AudioCubes were easily adaptable for patients as they could clearly see the relationship between the music and the visuals and there was no prerequisite for musical knowledge, so any one could use them.”

At the moment, she is continuing to use the AudioCubes for her PhD research (Supervisor: Dr. Garth Paine) where she “looks at using new forms of interactive music technology to distract teenage patients from boredom within hospital to help promote wellbeing“, as she describes her research on her blog: Interactive Music for Distraction, a PhD journey.

We’re really looking forward to hearing more about this research!

^{[1] The project is being undertaken within the Music Department, School of Communication Arts, at the University of Western Sydney. It was a collaboration with The Department of Adolescent Medicine, The Children’s Hospital Westmead. The project was run by Dr Garth Paine and Samantha Ewart}

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Tags: AudioCubes, children, dr. garth pain, hospital, music cubes, PhD, research, samantha ewart

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2011 at 18:05 and is filed under Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.