The Mobile Audience as a Digital Musical Persona in Telematic Performance

Abstract

One of the consequences of the pandemic has been the potential to embrace hybrid support for different human group activities, including music performance, resulting in accommodating a wider range of situations. We believe that we are barely at the tip of the iceberg and that we can explore further the possibilities of the medium by promoting a more active role of the audience during telematic performance. In this paper, we present personic, a mobile web app designed for distributed audiences to constitute a digital musical instrument. This has the twofold purpose of letting the audience contribute to the performance with a non-intrusive and easy-to-use approach, as well as providing audiovisual feedback that is helpful for both the performers and the audience alike. The challenges and possibilities of this approach are discussed from pilot testing the app using a practice-based approach. We conclude by pointing to new directions of telematic performance, which is a promising direction for network music and digital performance.