Musique Concrète Choir: An Interactive Performance Environment for Any Number of People

Using the Web Audio API, a roomful of smartphones becomes a platform on which to create novel musical experiences. As seen at WAC 2015, composers and performers are using this platform to create clouds of sound distributed in space through dozens of loudspeakers. This new platform offers an opportunity to reinvent the roles of audience, composer, and performer. It also presents new technology challenges; at WAC 2015 some servers crashed under load. We also saw difficulties creating and joining private WiFi networks. In this piece, building on the lessons of WAC 2015, we load all our sound resources onto each phone at the beginning of the piece from a stable, well-known web host. Where possible, we use the new Service Worker API to cache our resources locally on the phone. We also replace real-time streaming control of roomful of phones with real-time engagement of the audience members as performers.