This paper presents a longitudinal autoethnography of developing performance practice with a movement-based digital instrument. This instrument extends the human body and enables performers to express musical aesthetics through their movement. What started as a design practice and understanding the boundaries of performer roles, primarily between musicians and dancers, has resulted in extended periods of personal practice over five years. Through this performance-led autoethnography, I investigate how long-term engagement with technology supports the evolution of bodily sensitivities, enhances attunement to the performance ecology, and informs design transformations. Based on a reflexive thematic analysis of field notes, documentation materials (i.e., audio, video recordings, compositions, and scores), and journal entries, maintaining a creative practice through self-reflexivity revealed intimate connections with the researcher’s own body, as well as with other performing bodies beyond technology. This autoethnography contributes to HCI by demonstrating how embracing nonlinear processes, temporal dissonances, and aesthetic misalignments can cultivate design transformations.

While many assistive devices and accessible technologies aim to increase access and participation of d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) audiences, DHH people's active participation in music performance remains limited.Through a 15-month-long group autoethnography, we present a case study of a Deaf-owned music and culture institution in a mixed-hearing, technology-mediated performance practice.We unpack how technologies are adapted and developed by DHH musicians and highlight the existing and emerging challenges of mixed hearing creative spaces.We use retrospective accounts, field notes, and performance artifacts to reveal the methods we developed for more inclusive music co-creativity.We lastly present three essential strategies that support DHH individuals' sonic agency and access, with or without prior music knowledge, applicable by different actors who partake in the DHH or mixed hearing music performance ecosystem.

This proposed research investigates movement-based interaction techniques for designing new musical instruments. It provides an aesthetics-based evaluation of a case study, Bodyharp, a new digital musical instrument at the intersection of music and dance. My dissertation examines not only developing new musical instruments but also performance practices that can be shared across diverse skill sets and abilities. In this project, I investigate this approach by bringing both the musician’s and the mover’s experiences closer to each other. In this paper, the design of the instrument and its earlier iterations are provided as well as an ongoing user study. The preliminary results of the user study, the future directions of this dissertation project, and its anticipated contributions are discussed.

Videos are a convenient platform to begin, maintain, or improve a fitness program or physical activity. Traditional video systems allow users to manipulate videos through specific user interface actions such as button clicks or mouse drags, but have no model of what the user is doing and are unable to adapt in useful ways. We present adaptive video playback, which seamlessly synchronises video playback with the user's movements, building upon the principle of direct manipulation video navigation. We implement adaptive video playback in Reactive Video, a vision-based system which supports users learning or practising a physical skill. The use of pre-existing videos removes the need to create bespoke content or specially authored videos, and the system can provide real-time guidance and feedback to better support users when learning new movements. Adaptive video playback using a discrete Bayes and particle filter are evaluated on a data set collected of participants performing tai chi and radio exercises. Results show that both approaches can accurately adapt to the user's movements, however reversing playback can be problematic.