The Effect of Social Interaction on Facilitating Audience Participation in a Live Music Performance

Facilitating audience participation in a music performance brings with it challenges in involving non-expert users in large-scale collaboration. A musical piece needs to be created live, over a short period of time, with limited communication channels. To address this challenge, we propose to incorporate social interaction through mobile music instruments that the audience is given to play with, and examine how this feature sustains and affects the audience involvement. We test this idea with an audience participation music system, Crowd in C. We realized a participation-based musical performance with the system and validated our approach by analyzing the interaction traces of the audience at a performance. The result indicates that the audience members were actively engaged throughout the performance, with multiple layers of social interaction available in the system. We also present how the social interactivity among the audience shaped their interaction in the music making process.