CoSiMa @ WAC’15

At the first international Web Audio Conference (WAC’15), CoSiMa presented three pieces of work.


Collective Sound Checks (poster)

Just like at TEI’15 the week before, we presented our work on the Collective Sound Checks through the poster you can see below. Quite a lot of people gathered at our booth during the demo session to play with the web apps and create spontaneous collective performances.

Collective Sound Checks WAC'15 Poster


Soundworks (paper & poster)

We presented a draft of the Soundworks library (which has evolved quite a lot since then): Soundworks is a Javascript framework that enables artists and developers to create collaborative music performances where a group of participants distributed in space use their smartphones to generate sound and light through touch and motion.

In particular, we used Soundworks to build the Drops collective performance (see below). You can read the WAC paper here, or have a look at the Github repository for more up-to-date information. Finally, you’ll find the WAC poster below.

Soundworks WAC'15 poster


Drops (performance)

Finally, we presented the first public representation of Drops, a collective smartphone performance built with Soundworks. Drops is strongly inspired by the mobile application Bloom by Brian Eno and and Peter Chilvers, and transposes it into a collaborative experience: each participant can only play a single sound (i.e. a single pitch), whose timbre can vary depending on the touch position. Together, the players can construct sound sequences (i.e. melodies) by combining their sounds. The sounds are repeated in a fading loop every few seconds until they vanish. Players can clear the loop by shaking their smartphones. The sounds triggered by one player are automatically echoed by the smartphones of other players. The collective performance on the smartphones is accompanied by a synchronized soundscape on ambient loudspeakers. This first Drops representation gathered around 60 players at the WAC.

CoSiMa @ TEI’15

CoSiMa submitted a Work-in-Progress paper at the Tangible and Embedded Interfaces conference held at Stanford University in January 2015 (TEI’15). The paper Collective Sound Checks — Exploring Intertwined Sonic and Social Affordances of Mobile Web Applications describes the mobile-web scenarios we tested at the Centre Pompidou with the Studio 13/16, and explores how these new forms of musical expression strongly shift the focus of design from human-computer interactions towards the emergence of computer-mediated interactions between players based on sonic and social affordances of ubiquitous technologies.

We presented our work during the poster session, and we got a lot of attention from the conference attendees: people had a lot of fun playing with the CoSC Web Applications and We Will Rock You: Reloaded, were impressed by the work done, and are looking forward to the upcoming developments.

Collective Sound Checks TEI-15 Poster

The paper is available in the ACM Digital Library (PDF and additional information).