Description
Sang Won Lee, Jason Freeman · Georgia Tech · NIME 2013
A piece for large-scale audience participation in which the audience are the instrument. You download the app at the concert, and it plays immediately — no tutorial, no practice. Between 20 and 150 phones join over WiFi or 3G, alongside an acoustic instrument player on stage.
The part worth borrowing is how it keeps a crowd of untrained people from producing noise: a master musician on stage selects the chord, and every audience phone is constrained to that harmony in real time. Individual players choose when and what to play within it. Nobody can be wrong, but everybody is making a decision — the constraint is harmonic, not temporal, so people still hear themselves in the result. Audience members can also send each other sounds, which is where the name comes from.
The post-concert survey reported that the instrument was easy to use and that the audience felt connected both to the music and to the other players.
image: Lee & Freeman, “echobo: Audience Participation Using The Mobile Music Instrument”, NIME 2013 (CC BY 4.0)