Computer supported cooperative music: overview of research work and projects at the Audio Visual Institute – U.P.F

In this paper the authors present an overview of recent work on ongoing projects at the Audiovisual Institute from the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, focused on Internet collaborative virtual environments for music applications. Although presenting different strategies, they all put a special emphasis in performance and composition/production of music by groups of geographically dispersed communities of users, both in synchronous and asynchronous modes. It is presented an overview of the concepts and developments in: The FMOL project that approaches collaborative music composition and performance over the web in an asynchronous fashion in its original version (Jordá, 1998, 1999), and that is currently under development evolving to a new architecture with a synchronous paradigm and several relevant new features (Jordà and Wüst, 2001); The Public Sound Object project, which consists on a permanent web installation for collaborative musical performance, currently at preliminary development stage (Barbosa and Kaltenbruner, 2001).