Getting the band together: towards a prototype mobile app for getting a balanced line-up for starting bands

Abstract

Generally, it is hard and counter-intuitive for people to step outside of their comfort zone and go out there and meet new people to do activities with. An example of such an activity is making music. Because of this occurrence we are missing out on a lot of potentially valuable social links and successful music bands. People who play and/or write music naturally want to find people to play their music for and, more ideally, with. However, it is hard to find the right people to do that with and for that formation to potentially be successful. Research has found that balanced work groups are more successful than unbalanced groups in achieving a certain goal. These balanced work groups were achieved by using an Adaptive Interactive System (AIS) that is built around the DISC personality assessment. This study researches if this system can also be applied in the world of music, by forming balanced music bands. Also, a design framework is proposed that can help building a mobile application that uses this system. For this, a literature review, interviews with conservatory teachers, and focus groups with students from one of those conservatories have been performed. The literature review provides the concepts that are investigated during the interviews. The focus groups are used for investigating these same concepts (from another perspective) and for the requirements engineering of the design framework. The analyses of the interviews and focus groups tell us that it is indeed possible to use an AIS towards the goal of building balanced bands, while also finding out that this could end up in potentially more successful bands. However, some adjustments need to be made to the original system for it to work most optimal in a creative realm, like music, in contrast to the task-based enterprise realm from the working groups in earlier research.