Mobile Music and Musician

Mobile music applications became increasingly common. Smartphones can now be used as digital instrument and provide musical creation with real-time control through interfaces, accessories and sensors. The advancement in telecommunications invited their use in musical collaboration and as musical controllers exchanging information between many communication channels. In this context, we can see that there are still many technologies from Computer Networks and Mobile Computing that can facilitate the process of communication between mobile devices in musical applications. Thus, this study aims at evaluating new technologies for the creation of collaborative musical environments.

The hypothesis is that the remote collaboration between players is improved by exchanging "musical messages", which can represent audio signals or information for the synthesis of these signals. The focus is only on the processing of messages into mobile devices regarding the evolution of processing performance, and the Computer Music languages supported. These ideas make possible audio synthesis in real time, and avoid bandwidth consumption with transmission of audio signals.

We want to develop applications and systems to perform tests with different platforms and media over the network solutions like multicast, cloud computing and peer-to-peer connections. We will evaluate the time delay between sending and receiving messages, the effect of the number of users participating simultaneously, and the user experience on each proposal.

Some tests have been performed with web servers and Android devices demonstrating that certain solutions need to be enhanced for ease of use and optimize the computational performance to improve the experience of music for mobile musician. Details and informations about the applications created during this research can be found at: http://deusanyjunior.dj/

These are the works published during this research:

  • DE CARVALHO Jr, A. D., "Sensors2PD: mobile sensors and WiFi information as input for pure data", In: International Computer Music Conference / Sound and Music Computing Joint Conference, Athens, Greece, 2014.
  • ANDEIRA, A. D.; DE CARVALHO Jr, A. D. Notes on the Elimination of the Mobile Music Audience. In: The Fourteenth Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology, 2014, New London, CT, USA.
  • DE CARVALHO Jr, A. D.; SANTOS Jr, M. R; BIANCHI, A.; QUEIROZ, M. FFT benchmark on Android devices: Java versus JNI. In: Proceedings of the 14th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Music, 2013, Brasília, DF, Brasil.
  • DE CARVALHO Jr, A. D. Touches on the line: Sharing Csound scores using a web server and mobile phones. In: 2nd International Csound Conference, 2013, Boston, MA, USA.

Questions, contributions, comments, and cool messages are welcome!

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