Daisyphone: Support for Remote Music Collaboration

We have seen many new and exciting developments in new interfaces for musical expression. In this paper we present the design of an interface for remote group music improvisation and composition – Daisyphone. The approach relies on players creating and editing short shared loops of music which are semi-synchronously updated. The interface emphasizes the looping nature of the music and is designed to be engaging and deployable on a wide range of interaction devices. Observations of the use of the tool with different levels of persistence of contribution are reported and discussed. Future developments centre around ways to string loops together into larger pieces (composition) and investigating suitable rates of decay to encourage more group improvisation.