Who makes what sound? Supporting real-time musical improvisations of electroacoustic ensembles

Abstract

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. This paper reports on research that has 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 this paper is that, counterintuitively, for certain kinds of joint, real-time, coordination activities, temporal representations are important in helping to determine "who did what?". Copyright the author(s) and CHISIG.