Monitoring and supporting engagement in skilled tasks: From creative musical activity to psychological wellbeing

While good physical health receives more attention, psychological wellbeing is an essential component of a happy existence. An everyday source of psychological wellbeing is the voluntary practice of skilled activities one is good at. Taking musical creation as one such skilled activity, in this work we employ an interaction method to monitor varying levels of engagement of musicians improvising on a desktop robotic musical interface (a network of intelligent sonic agents). The system observes the performer and estimates her/his changing level of engagement during the performance, while learning the musical discourse. When engagement levels drop, the musical instrument makes subtle interventions, coherent with the compositional process, until the performer's engagement levels recover. In a user study, we observed and measured the behaviour of our system as it deals with losses of performer focus provoked by the controlled introduction of external distractors. We also observed that being engaged in our musical creative activity contributed positively to participants' psychological wellbeing. This approach can be extended to other human activities.