Collaborative Creativity as a Participatory Tool for Interactive Sound Creation

Collaborative creativity is a common methodology to solve design challenges such as industrial design, architecture, and more recently software design. Still, the sound art community lacks vigorous case studies of the application of collaborative creativity in artistic research in sound art installations and performances. The sound of our surroundings influence us continuesly and we need tools to incoporate the public in creation and evaluation of these sounds. Collaborative creativity is especially suited to the preliminary exploration of such sound space. The COLLAB approach includes three crucial steps addressing all relevant obstacles that are met when introducing sound art creation in public: First, we will analyze how public and interactive sound arts work. We study how general public interacs with interactive sound installations and what are the more interesting aspects of interactivity and sound for them. Additionally we emphasize on how people listen to sound and electronic music. This will enable the interdisciplinary communication about the project results. Second, prototypes will repeatedly be evaluated by two stakeholder groups (volunteers from general public and aesthetically trained sound artists). Third, we will provide open source, easy-to-use platforms for the public to participate in democratization of sound art, not only during the installations and performances, but also as sound art developers in their free time. The research will be carried out at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM), which has extensive experience in interactive sound and computer music composition. COLLAB will lead to interactive creation of sound art for public by the public. Conventions shall be established not in the sense of ready-made composition tools, but regarding the process of developing community based sound art installations and compositions.

This project investigated how musicians proactively adapted technologies to perform and produce music and sound collaboratively. New technology has given us opportunity to search for patterns in the proactive usage of new collaborative capacities. Any patterns in how sound-makers turned to new technological tools to and how it affects on traditional forms of musical collaboration and interaction would reflect the priorities of music-makers and the shape of the structures they work within. We started with exploring aspects of musical collaboration music-makers strive to preserve throughout their collaborations. We examined what social, cultural, and technological affordances did they rely upon to do so. We mostly worked with composers and musicians from electronic and computer music genre. There are aspects of this music genre that has lead the musicians to be tech savvy which makes them perfect candidates to participate in the design process of their music making tools. We also explored the collaboration networks of sound makers to establish participatory sound making practices among the musicians who are more interested in collective musical practices.