Styles of Participation and Engagement in Collective Sound Performance Projects

The SINE WAVE ORCHESTRA (SWO) is a collaborative sound performance project that has been actively performing for the past several years. The basic idea is that each participant plays a sine wave, and by changing its frequency and volume, creates a collection of sine waves as a collective sound representation. Although all SWO works use the same sound representation (i.e., sine waves), different SWO works use different temporal, physical, environmental, and procedural settings. The different settings have resulted in different types of sound experiences for the participants. This paper examines six of the SWO works and discusses what aspects of the settings affect how people engage in collective sound representations.