Researchers at the University of Paris-Sud have investigated the feasibility of issuing commands to computers and electronic devices by tapping beats on the devices themselves, a practice they called rhythmic interaction.

Little academic work has been done on the feasibility of using rhythmic patterns as a form of user input. But rhythmic interaction could provide handy shortcuts for issuing commands to touch-sensitive computational devices, said Emilien Ghomi, who summarized the researchers' work at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, being held this week in Austin, Texas.

Tapping on a device may be a particularly effective way to issue commands to devices that have limited user interfaces, such as smartphones or music players, Ghomi argued. While they would not be ideal as the primary interface, they could be handy as shortcuts, much like computer hot-key combinations are used today.

While on a smartphone, a user could tap out a command on the back of the handset while continuing to talk. A few taps on a music player with a very small touchscreen, such as an Apple iPod Nano, could trigger commands that would otherwise require a tedious digging through successive layers of menus, Ghomi noted. Building in the capability to recognize taps would be a trivial task for any OS maker, and a program to intercept taps would take up minimal device memory, he said.

The researchers conducted two sets of experiments involving 14 people, using laptops that would accept a series of finger taps on a trackpad as a form of input. The researchers created 30 rhythmic patterns, or motifs, out of a possible 799 patterns that could be generated with six beats or less.