The TMAP Framework: Describing the Design Space of Technology-Mediated Audience Participation in Live Music

Technology-mediated audience participation (TMAP) offers a wide variety of ways to enhance the involvement of spectators during a music performance. Technological change has created rich new opportunities for such interactive performance experiences. Effective design of TMAP requires balancing knowledge from diverse human and technological perspectives and taking into account very different characteristics and requirements in live music performance. However, research in this distinctive area of interaction design is limited, and the provision of practical guidance for designers has been scarcely addressed thus far. To bridge this gap, we propose the TMAP Framework, which describes the design space of audience participation in a practice-oriented way to support design-related processes. This descriptive framework is grounded on existing literature from the last 25 years, and has been iteratively improved and peer reviewed with different experts. It was validated using actual TMAP performances not included in the framework development. The TMAP Framework contains 180 entities in a tree-like sorted structure on four levels. Alongside the contribution to knowledge of extensively describing the design space of TMAP in live music, with the validation of the framework, we demonstrate its completeness, stability and generalisability. In this regard, the framework may also serve as a common language between different perspectives and practitioners, thus addressing the highly interdisciplinary nature of the TMAP field.