This paper reports on the design and audience evaluation of a collaborative interactive music system titled Polymetros. Designed for broad audiences, Polymetros aims to enable users without musical skills to experience collaborative music-making. First, we describe our design approach with reference to related research. A particular interest was to investigate how to provide novices with individual musical control within a collaborative context. We then present an audience evaluation that was conducted during an exhibition at a major art museum in the UK attended by large numbers of the general public across the age range. The results lead us to evaluate our design approach and reflect on implications for facilitating collaborative music-making for broad audiences. Furthermore, the findings provide interesting indications how the context of a public exhibition setting affects the audience interaction with such an interactive multi-player experience.

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Newly emerging urban IoT infrastructures are enabling novel ways of sensing how urban spaces are being used. However, the data produced by these systems are largely context-agnostic, making it difficult to discern what patterns and anomalies in the data mean. We propose a hybrid data approach that combines the quantitative data collected from an urban IoT sensing infrastructure with qualitative data contributed by people answering specific kinds of questions in situ. We developed a public installation, Roam-io, to entice and encourage the public to walk-up and answer questions to suggest what the data might represent and enrich it with subjective observations. The findings from an in the wild study on the island of Madeira showed that many passers-by stopped and interacted with Roam-io and attempted to make sense of the data and contribute in situ observations.

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