“Speakers, More Speakers!!! – Developing Interactive, Distributed, Smartphone-Based Immersive Experiences for Music and Art” presented by Forgette, Gillikin, Manaris and Ramdsen

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Session Title:
  • Sonic and Audiovisual Interfaces

Presentation Title:
  • Speakers, More Speakers!!! – Developing Interactive, Distributed, Smartphone-Based Immersive Experiences for Music and Art

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Abstract:

  • We describe a multi-speaker, smartphone-based environment for developing interactive, distributed music and art applications, installations, and experiences. This system facilitates audience engagement through participation via personal smartphones, potentially connecting with traditional computing devices via the Internet without additional software or special configurations.  The proposed approach has been inspired and motivated in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and builds on earlier works and technology.  It demonstrates a design approach that is more efficient and provides a new avenue for music composers and artists to design highly distributed, participatory, immersive music and art experiences, utilizing various input sensors and actuators available in today’s smartphones.  These include individual smartphone accelerometers, video cameras, and – of course – speakers. The use of smartphones also provides for relatively precise geolocation through GPS or simple social engineering approaches, such as using dedicated QR codes for different locations (e.g., seats in an auditorium). This allows for composing experiences to be rendered in the same room / auditorium, highly distributed across the Internet, or a combination of both.  The paper presents the technological background and describes three case studies of such experiences, in an attempt to demonstrate the approach and inspire new avenues for artistic creativity and expression towards highly immersive, participatory installations / performances of music and art works for the 21st century.

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