8: Open Symphony: Supporting Audience-Performer Interaction

Open Symphony: Supporting Audience-Performer Interaction for Participatory Live Music Performance

Yongmeng Wu, Leshao Zhang, Mathieu Barthet, Queen Mary University of London & Kate Hayes, Musician, Guildhall School of Music Graduate

*One of the six projects selected to join Audience Labs*

Summary:
Open Symphony is an immersive performance system which explores the creativity and spontaneity of reactive interactions through an ensemble of performers and an audience using mobile technology and data visualisation.

Description:
Western performing arts practices have traditionally restricted audience interaction with performers. What if this were revisited – not to replace – but to create novel types of musical experiences?

Open Symphony reimagines the music experience for a digital age, fostering alliances between performer and audience and our digital selves. The project investigates how to embrace digital technology in the live music environment to engage both audience and performers and develop new platforms for music composition, performance and listening. This ties in to the FAST project’s vision in the following ways:
(i) revisiting the live music consumption paradigm, shifting from creative passiveness during listening to an active engagement of consumers who become actors of the musical narrative,
(ii) fostering new forms of interaction between audience and performers negotiated by multimodal data (symbolic, visual and sonic),
(iii) adaptivity and personalisation of the musical content responding to consumers’ musical intentions and desires,
(iv) the development and evaluation of technologies to enable i) to iii), grounded into human computer interaction, web architecture and data visualisation.

Publications
K. Hayes, M. Barthet, Y. Wu, L. Zhang, N. Bryan-Kinns, A Participatory Live Music Performance with the Open Symphony System, Proc. of the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference (Interactivity), 2016.

Barthet, F. Thalmann, G. Fazekas, M. Sandler, G. Wiggins, Crossroads: Interactive Music Systems Transforming Performance, Production and Listening, Proc. of CHI workshop on Music and Interaction, 2016.

Yongmeng Wu, Leshao Zhang, Mathieu Barthet, Nick Bryan-Kinns, Open Symphony: Supporting Creative Audience Participation in Live Music Performance (submitted to IEEE Multimedia Magazine February 2016).

Leshao Zhang, Yongmeng Wu, Mathieu Barthet, A Web Application for Audience Participation in Live Music Performance: The Open Symphony Use Case (submitted to NIME 2016.

Further Information
Twitter: @matdiffusion
Further information: http://isophonics.net/content/opensymphony
Watch video: Youtube
See photos: Flickr

Supported by:

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