Audience-Participation Techniques Based on Social Mobile Computing

Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are becoming indispensable to everyday life, connecting us in a powerful network through services accessible via web browsers or mobile applications. In conjunction with recent explorations on physical interaction techniques for making music on mobile devices, the mobile platform can be regarded as an attractive solution for designing music performances based on audience participation. Using smartphones to enable audience participation not only offers convenience, but also tends to induce engaging and interactive social experience. In this paper, we first take a look at two separate phenomena of interest to us: the rise of mobile music and the design of audience participation performance paradigm. Then we present techniques for enabling audience participation based primarily on using smartphones, as experimented by the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra. We evaluate these techniques and consider the future of social music interactions aided by mobile technology.