We present Line-Storm, an interactive computer system for creative performance. The context we investigated was writing on paper using Line-Storm. We used self-report questionnaires as part of research involving human participants, to evaluate Line-Storm. Line-Storm consisted of a writing stylus and writing pad, augmented with electronics. The writing pad was connected to a contact microphone, and the writing stylus had a small micro-controller board and peripherals attached to it. The signals from these electronic augmentations were fed into the audio-synthesis environment Max/MSP to produce an interactive soundscape. We attempted to discover whether Line-Storm enhanced a self-reported sense of being present and engaged during a writing task, and we compared Line-Storm to a non-interactive control condition. After performing statistical analysis in SPSS, we were unable to support our research hypothesis, that presence and engagement were enhanced by Line-Storm. Participants reported they were, on average, no more present and engaged during the experimental condition than during the control condition. As creativity is subtle, and varies with person, time, context,  space and so many other factors, this result was somewhat expected by us. A statistically significant result of our study is that some participants responded to Line-Storm more positively than others. These Preservers of Line-Storm were a group, distinct from other participants, who reported greater presence and engagement and who wrote more words with Line-Storm and during the control condition. We discuss the results of our research and place Line-Storm in an artistic-technological context, drawing upon writings by Martin Heidegger when considering the nature of Line-Storm. Future work includes modifying interactive components, improving aesthetics and using more miniaturized electronics, experimenting with a drawing task instead of a writing task, and collaborating with a composer of electronic music to make a more interesting, immersive, and engaging interactive soundscape for writing or drawing performance. Our philosophy is that people have become frugal regarding "joy"! How we all are becoming increasingly suspicious of all joy! The desire for joy already calls itself a "need to recuperate" and is beginning to be ashamed of itself. -Nietzsche [51] Tod Machover [47] has emphasized the need to augment existing, traditional musical instruments while ensuring these augmentations act as stimuli to the creative process, not simply as additional features. One focus of this paper is to find a way to enhance human creativity. Another is to observe the emergence of the work when the system is used. A third, is our attempt to make something that is fun to use. We have conceived, designed, constructed, evaluated, our system called Line-Storm 1 , attempting to enhance a sense of both presence and engagement in the user. Only through performance with Line-Storm, does Line-Storm come into being. The method of experience sampling-interrupting a person as they go through their daily activities and asking questions about their experience-has been used to find that when peoples minds are wandering, they are less happy [43] . "Be Here Now," a mantra popularized in the United States by, for example, Dr. Richard Alpert [18] , who became Baba Ram Dass. This mantra now occurs in a leading business publication urging middle managers everywhere to "be present" to be a "great leader" [35] and presumably to reap the rewards of "success." Even the LSD experimentation Dass describes in Be Here Now, carried out on a small, socially acceptable scale in Silicon Valley, where tech workers "microdose" themselves with LSD, to enhance their creativity and improve interpersonal interactions [45] . Some esoteric practices leading to creative work may conjure images of the lone painter or poet, or of a sculptor in her studio. It is not only Silicon Valley technocrats, scrambling for millions and billions of dollars, who might benefit from enhancing human creativity. Even now one is ashamed of resting (equated to waste of time in our mind), and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in ones hand, while eating meals, and reading the latest news of the stock market; we live today not to miss out on anything. -Nietzsche [51] Note that Nietzsche was writing well over 100 years before "FOMO," or "fear of missing out," became an expression related to early 21st-century smartphone users. Our point is that we recognize that there are different meanings to the phrase creative work. For example, billionaires and poets are not endorsing the same thing when both use the word "creative" or the word "work," though both may praise "creative work." Some decry the extreme measures taken by LSD trippers in the 1960s [45] , and want to turn the drug into an effective money-making tool. An irony is that creative work translates into fortunes undreamt of by poets such as Robert Frost. There is a story in which Joseph Heller, author of the novel Catch-22, when told of an investment banker who had made more money last year than he might ever to be expected to make from the novel, replied that he had something the investment banker would never have: enough. So, we argue that it is possible that what was good for Heller, in the anecdote, would probably not have been good for the investment banker, even when the concept of creative work is broadened to include both their endeavors. Enhancing one type of creative work may not enhance the other. The ecstasy of the composer remarked upon by Csikszentmihalyi [15] or of the novelist, may not be found in the same way the "A-ha!" of the software developer is found. Our work involving Line-Storm has been an attempt to provide a ludic system for use by the creative worker. Gaver [24] defines a ludic system as one that is used for its own sake, and not for some other end. By attempting to increase a users sense of presence and engagement-their being here now-our hope is to provide an immersive environment in which to do creative work with a writing stylus such as the mechanical pencil we chose to use. Taskscape is a complex term from Ingold's "The Temporality of the Landscape" [38] , which we will refer to later, when speaking of the new possibilities of a task that Line-Storm exposes, as affordances in Gibson's sense of the term [22] . One of our committee members, a professor of music, suggested that our work involves the taskscape of the creative worker, working with a writing stylus and paper. This taskscape includes the place, people, and objects surrounding the creative worker doing creative work. The taskscape is social [38] . The experience of the user of our system, and of the research participants who gave of their time to be a part of this thesis, is a social experience, and the writing tasks they performed are tasks that fit into "an array of activities"-which include the writing of this sentence [38] . We do not know-as above, because too little work has been done in this area-whether the taskscape of a user of Line-Storm is altered in ways more conducive to writing poetry than to the drafting of microprocessor plans, for example, or vice versa. Rather than devise a completely new tool, we have chosen to augment an otherwise ordinary mechanical pencil 2 . Perhaps by looking 2 We could have similarly augmented a paintbrush or a pen, though the away from our goal, creative enhancement-as we must when looking at faint night-sky objects with the naked eye (Springob, 2015)-and making the use of the system the primary activity, and the work done with it a secondary activity, we think we will find ourselves progressing in that direction, whereas a direct approach would not have succeeded. By giving a chance for play, we have hoped our system, Line-Storm, serves as stimulant and facilitator "to the creative process itself," as Machover [47] advises. We discuss our experimental results. We conceived our work, initially, as an entertainment system, to be used for one's own pleasure while writing in a journal. We followed that by hoping to jolt users out of complacent acquaintance with paper and pencil and present the writing tools and writing situation as if for the first time, to encourage the practice of writing and sending handwritten letters. We finished the work by attempting to enhance human creativity when working with a writing stylus and paper writing pad, by increasing participants' sense of presence and engagement. We found correlations and K-means clustering results that did suggest there was a group of participants who responded favorably to Line-Storm. We expected that a direct approach to enhancing creativity may/would fail; we attempted to construct a system the use of which would be an end and not only a means [24] , and hoped this might lead, indirectly, to enhancing creativity by encouraging play and playfulness. We provided a ludic environment for creative work, in which some users would focus on using the system, not expecting an outcome and will create their own play/outcome and accept what emerges or not-no quest, no winners, no points or gold to deliver outcome-based satisfaction. In a ludic system, therefore, the creative work (outcome is what it is) and the results would be a secondary consideration and may emerge by itself, an indirect result of the use of the system. We hoped participants in our experiments would find themselves "losing themselves," and a group of participants did tend to lose track of time while they used or performed with Line-Storm. We believe these participants became more absorbed while using the experimental system, exactly our intention. Losing oneself while using the system might open one up to creative energies, thoughts, feelings, and actions that would ordinarily not occur, as Nietzsche [51] wrote.
Interactive stylus based sound incorporating writing system
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