When scrolling through the NIME 2024 proceedings, one title stopped me mid-scroll: “How Musical Is Dog?” by Alon Ilsar. The reason was simple â I have a dog, Camillo. Like many dog people, I often find myself deeply engaged in shared physical play with him, and reading that this paper wasnât about dogs reacting to music, but about playing music with a dog, immediately made it feel more real, more grounded. Not just an abstract research experiment, but something relatable, playful, and very much part of my everyday life.
Playtime as Improvisation
One of the things I loved most about Ilsarâs project with Razzly was that it wasnât about teaching a dog to âperformâ but embracing the spontaneity of real play.
To all of you reading this, I thought you might like these two clips of Camillo doing what he does bestâbeing fully in the moment:
The Joy of Shared Play
Ilsarâs approachâembedding a gestural digital musical instrument, the AirSticks, into a fetch ballâtransforms something familiar and beloved to a dog into a shared musical experience. Thatâs what I loved most. Itâs not about training a dog to be a musician or teaching them to press buttons on a keyboard. Itâs about recognizing the shared rhythm, the back-and-forth, the improvisational quality of fetch as a kind of duet.
As someone working at the intersection of interaction design and everyday life, this resonated with me deeply. Design doesnât always have to be about solving problems or optimizing performanceâit can be about expanding joy, exploring alternative agencies, and finding meaning in the playful.
Camillo and the What-Ifs
Reading this made me reflect on the moments I share with my dog Camilloâhow we communicate without words, how we improvise and adapt. What if our daily play could be turned into music? Would it sound like anything Iâd recognize as âmusicalâ? Does that even matter? The beauty of the project is that it lets go of human-centric definitions and opens up a new, more inclusive space for musicking.
At the same time, the article made me question the limits of interpretation. Ilsar acknowledges the difficulty of defining the dogâs role: is Razzly making music, or is she just playing fetch while her human maps the resulting motion into sound? Itâs a subtle line between shared authorship and creative framing. And while the paper does a great job opening up that discussion, I think it could have gone even deeper into the ethical implications of projecting meaning onto another speciesâ behavior.
Musicality vs. Meaning
Here lies the tension: who decides what counts as music? The title itselfâHow Musical Is Dog?âinvites critique. It implies a scale, a measure, and yet the content of the paper pushes against those rigid definitions. Razzly isnât playing a melody, but she is engaging in a rhythmic, expressive act. For us as designers and researchers, the takeaway isnât about turning animals into performersâitâs about being attuned to the rhythms of non-human lives and translating those into forms of expression with, not for them.
Still, I found myself wishing for a deeper dive into the dog’s perspectiveânot just how the human interprets the interaction, but how the dogâs sensory and perceptual world is being altered by the musical mapping. Are there sounds the dog finds unpleasant? Does the sound reinforce the play, or distract from it? These questions feel crucial in a project that so beautifully centers interspecies collaboration.
Implications for Design
For my own practice, this article sparked a chain of thoughts. Could more of our interfaces be designed with multispecies collaboration in mind? Could inclusive design extend beyond human users? What does âuser experienceâ mean when your user canât read or speak your language, but can wag their tail, tug a rope, or bounce around with glee?
Thereâs something liberating in designing for joy instead of productivity, for response rather than control. This paper reminded me that interaction design can be messy, playful, speculativeâand still deeply meaningful.
âHow Musical Is Dog?â doesn’t offer all the answers, and it doesnât try to. It opens a door. For me, itâs a reminder that research doesnât need to be cold and distant to be valuableâit can be warm, fuzzy, and a little chaotic, like Camillo chasing a ball through the park.
And maybe thatâs what we need more ofânot only in musical interface design, but in our broader thinking about technology, play, and connection.
https://nime.org/proceedings/2024/nime2024_29.pdf
