World Stage: Crowdsourcing Paradigm for Expressive Social Mobile Music

The combination of powerful mobile devices and the connective potential of cloud-based computing are changing how, where, and when people use computers. No longer physically tethered, computers embedded in mobile phones and tablets freely roam in daily life alongside their human users while persistently connected to the network. At the same time, the pervasiveness of computing enables us to engage people to solve large-scale problems by leveraging human intelligence and the effect of large crowds. In this paper, we discuss a new model for crowdsourced musical interactions based on mobile devices. This model, which we call World Stage, is a pseudoanonymous, location-aware ecosystem designed to connect hundreds of thousands of users in a social-musical game involving expressive musical performance and collaborative musical feedback. We describe the motivation and mechanics of the World Stage, and present a full implementation and case study around a commercial iPhone application: Smule’s Leaf Trombone: World Stage. We also present the experiential design and the technological infrastructure around the World Stage and discuss the unique social/musical possibilities it affords. This work is about exploring, perhaps for the very first time, a crowdsourcing eco-system that incorporates expressive music-making and with game-like elements, aimed at inciting a mass audience.