Creative Participation for Audiences of Live Music Performances

udience participation in musical performances can be manifested in many ways, from a receiver sense (sitting in silent contemplation of sounds, for example) to a more active form of participation involving physical actions contributing to the performance (singing along with musicians, for example). We consider the latter to be creative participation. Note that we’re not referring to creative participation in the semiotics sense, implying that the meaning of the artwork is completed by the receiver, which can be considered a cognitive form of participation. Rather, we’re more focused on how creative participation can foster audience-performer collaboration for music making. As Western art music has evolved from early music forms for the recreation of amateurs, to post-Renaissance music for entertainment by highly skilled professional performers, it has created a divide between audiences and performers. Certain music traditions have developed unwritten rules about audience etiquette, constraining the range of behaviors and interactions judged to be acceptable; in some concert halls, “correct” audiences are expected to sit quietly and applaud only at certain times. The musical communication model that prevails in many cultures and traditions operates in a linear and unidirectional way—from composer to performer to audience-receiver. What if this were revisited (but not replaced) to create alternative musical experiences, changing the relationships between the composition, composer, performers, and audiences? Reconfiguring the links between the triad of artwork, artists, and audiences is one of the goals of participatory art, and researchers have explored such a reconfiguration within the interactive and performance arts. One remarkable initiative aims to enrich concert experiences using digital multimedia and Internet technology; however, the work doesn’t address creative participation by audiences during live performances, which is the object of our current and other works. Open Symphony is a new participatory music performance system that explores the creativity and spontaneity of reactive interactions between an ensemble of performers and an audience using mobile technology and data visualization. The system aims to extend the nature of live music performance by enabling audience members to collaborate in the development of a musical piece. Audience members actively influence the music being played in a live environment, creating a mutual experience between multiple audience members and performers.