3001:MMMI

From ITPedia

File:1176875823 mmmi.jpg 300px
Made by	Joo Youn Paek, Joshua Knowles
Made for	Thesis Spring '07 with Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Short description	3001:MMMI is a new way for an audience to collaboratively perform music using mobile phones as controllers for a single performance.
Displayed at (Venues)	Spring Show 2007
Homepage Location	http://auscillate.com/mmmi/
Additional Keywords	mobile phones, music, nime, performance, mupe, j2me, processing, max/msp

Description

3001:MMMI is a new way for an audience to collaboratively perform music. Audience members interact with a large projection screen using their mobile phones and playfully control, create, and perform a live piece of music together. 3001:MMMI is a fun, social experience encouraging both interaction between the audience and the performance and interaction between individual audience members.

It works like this:

Each member of the audience uses their phone (or a loaner phone) to control a small avatar on the screen. How this avatar moves around and interacts with other audience member's avatars determines what sorts of sounds, melodies, and patterns will play out of the main sound-system. An audience member pushes buttons on the phone to control the avatar on the screen. They see which other members they're connecting with and are given the ability to play in the musical space and experiment.

I have a system developed, as well, so that I can "score" the performance in advance and allow the player interaction to algorithmically affect this score. This allows the audience to have fun and feel the interactivity, but reigns in the cacophony by introducing constraints such as amplitude dynamics and coherent chord structures.

The system currently works like such: Each mobile phone runs an J2ME (Java) applet that connects with a master Java server computer through a local wifi router. This Java server connects via a socket connection to a second computer running the visualization using Processing and Max/MSP for audio output.

References

Thanks to Jonah Brucker-Cohen, my thesis advisor, and especially to Joo Youn Paek, who has helped me develop this project over the semester. And to everyone in my thesis class and to those who have helped me user-test this thing.