Mutual Engagement in Social Music Making

Mutual engagement occurs when people creatively spark together. In this paper we suggest that mutual engagement is key to creating new forms of multi-user social music systems which will capture the public’s heart and imagination. We propose a number of design features which support mutual engagement, and a set of techniques for evaluating mutual engagement by examining inter-person interaction. We suggest how these techniques could be used in empirical studies, and how they might be used to inform artistic practice to design and evaluate new forms of collaborative music making.