Vuzik: Music Creation and Comprehension through Painting

Abstract

Vuzik is an interface designed to empower users to create digital music by painting. Through an intuitive mapping of sound to visuals designed to be simple enough for a child to comprehend, Vuzik uses a music-painting metaphor to enable users to compose and perform music through simple painting gestures, effectively "seeing" their music as they hear it. Our paper presents the design of Vuzik, details the implementation of the current prototype, and discusses the preliminary user evaluation we performed and how it informs our coming design efforts. We envision that Vuzik will help both the creator and audience better understand music's construction, thereby making the composition of music more accessible to children and novices and opening up new creative approaches for all.