Entangled Internet of Musical Things and People: A More-Than-Human Design Framework for Networked Musical Ecosystems

This paper proposes a paradigm shift from the current wave of Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT) research, which is mostly centered on technological development, towards the new wave of the Internet of Musical Things and People (IoMusTP). This wave focuses not only on musical stakeholders’ values, needs, behaviors and diversity, but also on their mutual entanglement with networked musical devices, services and environment. In the IoMusTP, technology is not only aware of the users and their surrounding context, but is also compliant to ethical and sustainable principles that will make it possible more inclusive, personalized, and socially acceptable experiences for the 21st-century musical stakeholders and beyond. The move from the IoMusT to the IoMusTP is a move from a network of musical devices to a network of musical stakeholders, whose interactions with musical resources as well as other stakeholders are empowered by devices. To this end, we propose a framework that can concretely guide designers of IoMusT technologies in considering the human and non-human factors relevant in the IoMusTP vision. We illustrate our framework by analyzing a set of case studies, showing how existing systems are insufficient to comply with the IoMusTP vision. Finally, we reflect on the challenges ahead of us, identifying a set of promising future directions that can inform the development of the next generation of IoMusT technologies.