Coordination between ensembles of improvising electroacoustic musicians is a special case of the larger HCI problem of coordinating joint, real-time activity; one that involves some interesting additional and different challenges.
Our research identified two specific real-time coordination problems for ensembles of electroacoustic musicians: “who makes what sound? ” and “how is the sound being altered? ”
Real-time sound visualization is explored as a possible solution to assist musicians in overcoming some of these challenges. The main contribution of our work is that, counterintuitively, for certain kinds of joint, real-time, coordination activities, temporal representations are important in helping to determine “who did what?”
We extend our deepest gratitude to Ang Mo Faux for welcoming us into their creative practice, evaluating the prototypes we developed, and providing reflection about how the visualizations can help them in their creative work. Have a look at the Ang Mo Faux YouTube Channel videos for more information on their work.
