Description
Davor Vincze, Maurice Oeser · NIME 2025
A performance for solo electronics that moves the Freedom Collective web app out of a theatre setting and into a concert. Audience members open the app on their own phones and become a distributed array of sound sources spread through the room, resonating in real time with the central material of the performance — granulation and related processes.
The design turns a defect into the instrument: phone audio latency and output quality vary unpredictably from handset to handset, and rather than correcting for this the piece uses that spread to build a sound field no single loudspeaker arrangement could produce. What each phone plays is sent to it; the audience holds the sound but does not compose it.
image: Vincze & Oeser, “We’re in this together: Expanding Interactive Sonic Spaces”, NIME 2025 (CC BY 4.0)
On scope. Filed under participatory music, but the participation is spatial, not creative — this is a solo performance using the audience as a speaker array. It is kept as a counter-example: a work whose title and framing promise collective music-making, and whose control structure delivers none.