Mobile technologies for music interaction

Abstract

A great smile to Luvyn, Lara, Leã, Petit, Neve, Mingau, and Suri. Namaste to all souls and energies surrounding me.Thank you all for supporting this research process. I am thankfully glad you exist. i ii Abstract DE CARVALHO JUNIOR, A. D. Mobile Technologies for Music Interaction. 2017. 187 p. Thesis (Doctorate) -Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, 2017.Mobile music applications are becoming commonplace around the world, and mobile devices are used as digital instruments everywhere. Controlling, performing, or composing music in real time with these devices encourages collaboration and interaction, as telecommunication improvements allow many people to cooperate through local networks or the Internet. In this context, the aim of this thesis is to evaluate mobile technologies that might be suitable for mobile musicians and their audiences while performing or composing. Specically, the main goal is to explore technologies for collaborative mobile music and to obtain quantitative and qualitative data regarding these technologies and their settings, so that composers might take full advantage of the available options for mobile applications. This evaluation focuses on message exchange using Multicast, Unicast, and Cloud Services, using academic networks as the main pathway. With these services, messages are organized as packet streams, characterized by dierent sizes and time intervals. Evaluation also includes the development of several applications that make use of these technologies running on Android devices and web browsers. These applications were used in actual performances, serving as both evaluation tools and experimental music instruments. The results were analyzed in terms of round trip time and data loss under very dierent conguration scenarios, demonstrating that although some obvious impediments are unavoidable (e.g. signicant delays in international settings), it is possible to choose the specic technology and achieve interesting results under most music application scenarios. I argue that although in theory Multicast appears to be the best technology to use by far, it is the most dicult to implement due to the burden of conguring every step of the network pathway. On the other hand, Cloud Services are certainly slower than direct connections, but are the most compatible and easiest technology to set up, and are denitely suitable for many collaborative music experiences. To conclude, there is a discussion of how mobile music practitioners can take advantage of these results for composition and performance by considering specic technological advantages or drawbacks that are inherent to each technology and setting.