Design 21: Social Design Network

douglas, Do you play drums? I do! I have Yamaha DTXtreme IV electronic drums in my office, and I play all the time. the question of making noise is a very big problem for drummers. I now play through headphones, but I still had complaints coming from my neighbors because of vibration, so I had to build a sound isolating platform. While this is an interesting problem, and one that I am very interested in, I am not sure whether the effort to make drum practice more neighborly is something that will be of interest to NFP's, but maybe I am wrong about that. I think that trying to develop products for "drumming therapy" might get people more excited. I have heard that some occupational and physical therapists working with autistic children have them do certain kinds of movement that involve carrying out movements that are a lot like drumming, where each limb has to do something independent from the others. For some reason, this calms them down when they get overly stimulated. If you were to pursue this direction, you would have to really become very knowledgeable about various existing music therapy techniques, and then try to figure out how to create a new product that improves therapeutic outcomes.
Let's talk about this. Steven

I was thinking about ideals.

Ideal situations... I haven't identified a pressing problem, because as you've proved you have an electronic drum set in your office.

You've solved the shock situation by creating a sub structure...

Of course there are measures that can be taken to make it possible to play drums in private space without it affecting the public sphere.

With Rick I discussed the possibilities or directions of my thesis; we came to conclusions such as,

considering the human and a personal product;

take for example an IPOD ...

(tangentially);

On the subway you can tell who is a musician by what they are doing with their hands... a guitarist has headphones on and they're picking imaginary strings, or fretting an imaginary fret board on their leg...a pianist, a drummer, and so on...

what if you turned over the IPOD and rested it on your leg while sitting. you could then tap on the back lets say its a keyboard...

 In your headphones you can hear feedback from that action...it could be a muted amplifyed thump sound, like a heart beat, alongside the music you are listening to...or it could be graphed out into pads, that triggered real drum sounds...or keyboard...in effect an Ipod touch pad synthesizer...

                   Going  back to the notion of the public and private sphere.

where as one avenue for exploration is to consider real estate such as your office electronic kit with sub structure....or my social questioning of public storage, and whether or not I can rent a storage space to store my drums and visit from time to time, to play them....

                   So Real estate versus, a personal sound product....

I think I'm locating a design direction, but haven't found a mission...or problem....

The problem may be defined as practice space?

shallow...

What else am I connecting to...is it physical therapy of some kind...or is it music therapy? ? ?

Some reasoning on my non profits if you've seen my list...Guitar Center, and two art spaces... I thought I might create a microcosm ;a study of the effects of sound on the mind....

Rick mentioned an NPR radio show that discussed the sound of different styles of music and how it affected the personality of dogs listening to it....if the dog was listening to heavy metal , it was anxious, and if listening to classical it was calm...

We mentioned noise in the public sphere such as construction noise....

         what if we told someone using a jack hammer that he could only hammer a particular rhythm...as if we handed the worker hammering a sheet of acceptable  notation....

Perhaps the neighbors would mind the noise as much, or because the pattern of sound was more predictable it faded from active memory, or receded into the background....in a sense a phase cancellation(maybe?conceptually?) or white noise.... a predictable pattern contrary to irregular, sporadic, unpredictable....

we discussed sound as a tool....

sound isolation headphones.

carpel tunnel syndrome

the blind; kinesthetics

hearing loss; in ear monitors

information processing

analog vs. digital

real drum sound/ electronic drum sound/ feel/authenticity/ technology/ patterns and possibilities/ hybrids/

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Douglas, is this your drum set?

That is my drum set where I used to be able to play .