Participatory Interactive System For Live Music Performance:Mobile Application Design

This thesis discusses the design and implementation of the mobile application and server side engine of Open Symphony.Open Symphony is an interactive system which allows audience to collaboratively conduct a live music performance.The system aims at enhancing audience engagement and creating new forms of live music experiences.Open symphony interactive system creatively applied music mode interaction model.By abstract music score into five different music mode,audience without professional music knowledge could communicate with musicians through the system and conduct musician to do music creative activities.Thus,music creative activities were open to all audience,audience could participate in live music performance.With this system,audience are automatically divided into groups and assigned to a random performer,being able to send music mode directions using their mobile devices in order to conduct improvised performance.The dominant directions in each group will then feed to performers as a guidance of what to play next.The visual feedback is generated with the votes collected from all the audience and is presented on two screens,a bigger one for audience and a smaller one for performers.Audience and performers together created a creative closed cycle to generate good music with audio visual feedbacks.We developed five prototypes of the mobile application with different interaction types and server side engine of the system in total to test the methods for audience participation.These five prototypes implemented five different ideas to explore the interaction method including orientation mapping,motion gesture,swipe gesture,simple button,button with feedbacks.Finally,applied with the fifth prototype,a live music performance was conducted as a public experiment.The survey after the performance proved the system has gained a great success and also pointed out the limitations for future improvements.