Open Symphony: Creative Participation for Audiences of Live Music Performances

Abstract

Most contemporary Western performing arts practices restrict creative interactions from audiences. Open Symphony is designed to explore audience-performer interaction in live music performance assisted by digital technology. Audiences can conduct improvising performers by voting for various musical 'modes'. Technological components include a web-based mobile application, a visual client displaying generated symbolic scores, and a server service for the exchange of creative data. The interaction model, app and visualisation were designed through an iterative participatory design process. The visualisation communicates audience directions to performers upon which to improvise music, and enables the audience to get feedback on their voting. The system was experienced by about 120 audience and performer participants (35 completed surveys) in controlled (lab) and "real world" settings. Feedback on usability and user experience was overall positive and live interactions demonstrate significant levels of audience creative engagement. We identified further design challenges around audience sense of control, learnability and compositional structure.

Co-Design of Musical Haptic Wearables for Electronic Music Performer's Communication

“…Furthermore, we will extend the results of this study for the application of MHWs for performer-performer interactions in remote settings. Other types of interactions will also be addressed such as between performers and Musical Things [11], as well as between performers and audience members (see e.g., [37]), in co-located or remote settings.…”

Large-scale audience participation in live music using smartphones

“…With Open Symphony by Wu et al (2017) audience members could make creative decisions and generate scores, the musicians were playing in real-time. However, the authors reported that spectators still 'wished to have more control' although some others 'felt challenged by the novelty'.…”

“…Smartphones have become a key device for large-scale audience participation in live music both for scientific studies as well as performing artists, e.g. Hirabayashi and Eshima (2015), Wu, Zhang, Bryan-Kinns, and Barthet (2017), Lee, Willette, Koutra, and Lasecki (2019) or Matuszewski, Schnell, and Bevilacqua (2019).…”

Towards a Semantic Architecture for the Internet of Musical Things

“…Semantic Audio also includes rich conceptualisation of audio metadata including the composition, production and consumption of audio and music [35]. The field has numerous applications, from navigation in large audio collections through automated tagging [36], through music recommendation [37] to intelligent music production [38] and participatory music performance [39], [40].…”