Orb3 - Musical robots within an Adaptive Social Composition System

Gesture capture, motion tracking and 3D visualisation technologies have generated many new musical forms, often extending the mannerisms or behaviours of a given performer or discipline, providing new compositional frameworks for real time synthesis in response to action. In many cases these approaches are presented within a single domain, a live stage performance, a site specific installation, a shared networked visualisation of collaborative composition. The reality is that these ‘interactivating spaces’ [1] whether haptic, [5] tactile [9] or ubiquitous [11] is that they manifest new forms of interaction, between people, systems and the medium of sound. Free Sound can be understood to be an extension of the ‘open work’ where the base materials for a compositional process are created through a model of exchange, interaction and resynthesis. The resulting output of these activities can be broadcast and disseminated through a range of technologies to both social and private spaces. This research suggests that there are new interaction models and social compositional frameworks to be found in these cybrid spaces, a previously intangible location often dominated by the broadcast and publishing industry. A marketing model defined by revenue streams and a value chain. In the case of socially mediated composition or ‘free sound’ there is still a value chain, it’s investors and beneficiaries are the open source community, the collaborators and participants within such mediated systems and the resulting free sound.