Abstract:

Our objective was to build a "Virtual Studio", an environment suited for creating musical compositions, interactively, on the web. Starting from this point, we studied the implementation of new computer based music instruments for distributed performance on the Web, called here as DMIs. We took advantage of the recent Java2 implementation to create a general model for developing interactive musical performance among Internet users. The DMIs were used in interactive performances where a MIDI Server receives several streams of MIDI data from several clients. In this paper, we present and analyse the performance of two DMIs: the first one is called "Rabisco" which allows the user to draw sound trajectories on the Web; the second, called "Cordas", is a fretted-string instrument implemented using class abstractions. In both examples, there is a heavy usage of Java Objected Oriented packages and they run in any browser supporting the current Java Virtual Machine (JVM) across the Web. We discuss the concept of each instrument, present the system implementation, results and discuss the research next step.