This WP is based on a spiral model of specification in which designers of the technical modules will meet regularly with the designers of the psychological and pedagogical experiments. This model is proposed based on previous projects involving both “technical” and “psychological” researchers, which demonstrated that relevant ideas often come from such a confrontation, during experiments where prototypes are put at work.

The aims are to develop a spiral process between user testing (WP5 and WP6) and MIROR prototyping design and implementation (WP3 and WP4), in order to transfer the results of user testing in the prototyping implementation and vice versa.

The WP will produce a regularly updated document, containing the specification of the technical modules, and the specification of the experiments. This document will be updated regularly, through the cross-observations of the various members and the Spiral model of design introduced in the project. More precisely, three versions of the Updated Specification document will be produced, one per year.

As a starting point, the specification of the IRMS will be derived from the previous research on children and adult interaction with the Continuator (Addessi & Pachet 2005, 2006, Pachet 2003), and from the psychological and pedagogical research on children/machine interaction and musical development (Young 2008, Stern 2004, McPherson 2004); the multimodal features to be extracted in real-time from movement, gesture, and audio data in order to analyse expressive qualities will be grounded on previous research on multimodal expressive gesture (Camurri et al 2005).