Musical meshworks

Abstract

There is longstanding interest in developing systems to support musical performances networked across multiple potentially geographically dispersed participants. Much past research has addressed technical problems such as latency to create simulacra of co-present performance settings. In contrast, we draw on the literature on digitally mediated performance in HCI to get a richer context for understanding networked live musical events. We describe a system, MESHWORKS, which permits the definition of varied participation roles and unusual network topologies, and explore its use to realize ArCCADE -a project to create events that support multiple overlapping musical ensembles and invite curiosity-driven exploration by the audience. Our experience with the system, the events and the interfaces we built to support engagement are discussed. In particular, we document how a musical community has emerged around our research and discuss wider implications for how we conceive the cultural meshwork new performance technologies are implicated in.