About the Digital Response Capture Project

The Digital Response Capture (DRC) project consists of a mobile application used for collecting real-time input data from a study participant, and this web application used to create the studies and view the collected participant data.

This project was developed by a group of four students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville for the university's music department and was inspired by the Continuous Response Digital Interface, a hardware device historically used in music research.

The goal of this project is to give researchers a better way to measure and study certain responses to music in order to better understand how people feel, think about, and experience different aspects of music.

The DRC project is completely open-source and contributions towards its continued development and maintenance are welcome and encouraged.

DRC Admin Panel on GitHub
DRC Interface on GitHub

How to create a new study

First, click the '+ NEW STUDY' button in the navigation bar at the top of the page. On this page you can specify a title for the study, a description, the maximum number of study submissions allowed, the Input Profile (see below), and also optionally upload an mp3 file to be played on the mobile device during their participation.

Note: mp3 files are only stored for 30 days, after which the study will no longer accept participants. This is to keep the cost of cloud storage low and may change in the future.

Input Profiles

There are five different controls available: a button, vertical and horizontal sliders, a toggle/switch, and a joystick. These controls are split up into 17 different configurations called Input Profiles.

If an Input Profile with a joystick is selected there is an additional option for low or high sensitivity. High sensitivity will capture whole numbers between 0 and 12, where 0 is neutral, 12 is up, 3 is right, 6 is down, etc. (think of a clock face). Low sensitivity still uses numbers in the range of 0 to 12 but rounds to the nearest multiple of 1.5 (cardinal and ordinal directions).

Using a study

After creating a study, you can access it by clicking its name in the list of studies on the 'HOME' page. When selected you will see the study details including the 'Study Key' which is a randomly generated 5 character alphanumeric code that the study participant can enter into the DRC Interface mobile application to load the configured input profile and audio (if an mp3 was uploaded) for the study.

The participant can then participate in the study by pressing the START button and interacting with the controls on screen. The participant's inputs are captured along with the timestamps at which the inputs occurred, and once they are done they can anonymously submit their participation data. This data can then be viewed and downloaded by the study creator on the corresponding study page.

Note that studies you create are tied to your login email and are only visible to you. See Privacy Policy.