Crowd in C[loud] : Audience Participation Music with Online Dating Metaphor using Cloud Service

In this paper, we introduce Crowd in C[loud], a networked music piece designed for audience participation at a music concert. We developed a networked musical instrument for the web browser where a casual smartphone user can play music as well as interact with other audience members. A participant composes a short tune with five notes and serving as a personal profile picture of each individual throughout the piece. The notion of musical profiles is used to form a social network that mimics an online-dating website. People browse the profiles of others, choose someone they like, and initiate interaction online and offline. We utilize a cloud service that helps build, without a server-side programming, a large-scale networked music ensemble on the web. This paper introduces the design choices for this distributed musical instrument. It describes details on how the crowd is orchestrated through the cloud service. We discuss how it facilitates mingling with one another. Finally we show how live coding is incorporated while maintaining the coherence of the piece. From rehearsal to actual performance, the crowd takes part in the process of producing the piece.

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