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This paper documents the challenges encountered during the development of a mobile web-based, real-time distributed reverberation chamber for a live concert setting. Initial efforts focused on leveraging existing open-source and commercial solutions, but these proved inadequate due to limitations in network compatibility, audio routing, and mobile device support. WebRTC emerged as the most viable option, offering peer-to-peer communication and firewall traversal capabilities. However, significant obstacles persisted, including network reliability, audio hardware/software ecosystem limitations, and debugging complexity. The project highlights the fragmented nature of real-time audio streaming technologies and the need for more transparent, reliable, and well-documented tools. Despite these challenges, the authors developed a functional web application prototype using WebRTC, Web Audio API, and custom Session Description Protocol modifications, offering insights into the complexities of deploying real-time audio systems over mobile networks. The paper concludes with reflections on speculative approaches, such as decentralized audio routing and native app development, and calls for improved documentation and standardized debugging tools to support future innovations.

This paper introduces a text-based, domain-specific language (DSL) for audio sample manipulation and playlist-based granular synthesis, embedded within the Cycling '74 Max \texttt{v8ui} environment using the mgraphics system, supporting real-time control and live coding. The interface enables command-line interaction with large-scale local audio corpora organised on a 2D self-organising map (SOM). It employs LISP-inspired prefix syntax and nested expressions, enabling performers to navigate and manipulate audio material through gesture-based control. The system emphasises modularity and customisation, enabling each musical gesture to be independently timed, chained, or sequenced, whilst supporting interaction models based on path-finding, spectral feature and metadata attribute filtering, and stochastic and probabilistic variation. This paper outlines the system’s architecture and influences, describes its core syntax and behaviors, and discusses implications for future developments in live coding design.

This paper documents the deployment of a mobile, web-based, real-time distributed reverberation chamber named the Auxtrument designed for a live concert setting. Rather than presenting a technical case study, the project is framed as an artistic and collaborative investigation into how networked audio systems can inform and transform musical composition and performance. In close collaboration with a contemporary orchestra, we composed two (2) site-specific works that utilise the inherent latency and uncertainty of WebRTC media streams over a mobile network as musical parameters. Through this process, we explored new aesthetic possibilities afforded by the system, foregrounding temporal instability and environment as integral compositional tools.

Through the design process of a cooperative audiovisual musical instrument, the Evangistrum, we explored users' sense of resonance and agency in relation to technology. The instrument's aim was to promote collaboration, have strong audiovisual congruence and to be intuitive to use while allowing for more complex levels of expression. Using Hartmut Rosa's theory on resonance as a philosophical framework, we explored how cooperation and a sense of agency can be encouraged within an audiovisual musical instrument, and how the interplay between audible, visual and tactile aspects of the instrument influenced users' cooperation and sense of agency. The design was built using Unreal Engine, controlled with commercially available midi controllers, and requires two users to operate. We tested consecutive instrument prototypes through three workshops and a concert. Through this process we gained valuable insight into the role of agency within successful creative collaboration, the complex interplay between the auditory and visual modes, the importance of mindset within collaboration and technology's potential for encouraging resonance.

Nowadays, there are newer container cranes that can be operated remotely from a control room. However, the data transmission between operators in the control room and their cranes could introduce high latency that may affect operators' ability to work safely and productively. We evaluated two types of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that could support operators to remotely control their container cranes in the presence of latency. The first GUI predicted how the crane would move based on the operator's real-time input, while the second GUI visualizes which prior input made by the operator is currently executed by the crane system. We involved seven remote crane operators in two experiments, where the first one compared both GUIs against the condition without additional visual support in constant latency rates and the second one compared both GUIs against the condition without additional visual support in continuously changing latency. Due to the small number of participants, it was not possible to confidently conclude that one GUI was significantly better based on the performance data of the crane operators. However, based on the feedback given by the crane operators, both GUIs were perceived less useful by the crane operators whether the latency rates were constant or continuously changing.

We present Auxtrument, a prototype instrument that allows audiences to experience the acoustic qualities of remote locations. Using the metaphor of a reverberation chamber, artists send signals from the mixers, bus, or aux via the Auxtrument's network connections from a concert hall to a few different locations. At each location the signal is played through loudspeakers and captured, colored by the acoustics and noises of the place, via a stereo or ambisonics microphone. The signal is sent back and played for the audience in a surround sound system conveying the spatial qualities of the places. The Auxtrument allows us to merge and layer the different locations in the concert hall. However, this arrangement places great demands on the network. The audio signals need to be high-resolution to preserve the inherent quality of the sounds, which creates large streams. The system must be equipped to work over different types of networks, and to enable any location, the system must work with mobile devices. After ruling out several commercial and opensource solutions, we built the Auxtrument with web technologies: mainly node.js, WebSockets, WebRTC, and WebAudio. 

This paper describes the design and development of The Unfinder, a prototypical interface that allows users to search and improvise music with audio files from a large local repository using music information retrieval based on content and metadata. The research is part of an ongoing project (IRESAP) concerned with tools incorporating current music information retrieval strategies that both support artistic practices and have utility outside of a performance setting. In The Unfinder, we aim to exploit the balance between accurately and reliably retrieving audio material from a file search system, and the potential for failure in the system to do so. Our prior research is used to frame design choices which are measured with a user study used to evaluate the interface. In the study we observed nine users of varying musical backgrounds playing with the instrument while taking notes of their utterances and ideas. The transcriptions of the user’s comments were analyzed using a thematic analysis method and five (5) themes were identified: perception, parameterization, identity, agency, and imaginaries. These themes indicate that the interface design is promising for artistic output, the use of a single feature for searching does not have much perceptual relevance, and the chosen features are useful for discovering audio files within serendipitous musical situations.

This text discusses today's digital transformation through the lens of Horkheimer and Adornos’ study of the enlightenment. Policy and public discourse around digitalisation embrace and adhere to the narrow tenets enlightenment thinking; the idea that rationality, individual freedom, and a society free from superstition are necessary and attainable goals. The costs of what has come to be called ‘Modernity’ are many. Through the application of rationality to all spheres of life, married with disruptive technological advancement, humanity has diminished its’ imagination – its ability to seek new directions. To paraphrase Horkheimer and Adorno, Modernism fights against nature, of which we are a part, and thus, paradoxically, sets us in a fight against ourselves. Environmental degradation, the price of progress, being just one example of this – deadening work, consumerism and severed social connections being amongst others. In this framing, digitalisation itself comes to be understood itself as akin to a force of nature – one that we can do little about, other than adjust and adapt or be swept away. But this by no means a foregone conclusion, there is light at the end of the optical fibre. Albeit that recent technical developments around artificial intelligence appears to be pushing policy makers into hasty decisions, the pace of the technical development is not as fast as we believe, and in comparison with the Reformation – we have time. If we can restrain ourselves from the resist, adapt or die responses promoted in popular discourse in face of the shock of large language models and rising threat of automation, then we create room to consider economic, social, and ecological alignment and accord, in the decision making and design of future interactive artefacts and digital services. The article argues that through postdigital aesthetics, technology makers can embrace materiality and the inherent qualities of digital technology to formulate a critique of existing trajectories in digital transformation, with consequences for a more sustainable future.

Due to safety and productivity concerns, there are newer cranes that can be operated remotely from a control room. As operators and their cranes are located separately, the communication between operators and their cranes is not free from time delay or latency. The presence of high latency could not only affect operators’ capability to work productively and safely, but could also affect their wellbeing due to the feeling of discomfort. In this paper, we propose two types of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that could support operators to perform their work in the presence of latency. The first GUI visualizes how the crane will move based on the user’s input as if the latency is not present, while the second GUI visualizes what kind of inputs that are being executed. We involved 20 participants in an experiment, where they had to move containers under conditions with three latency rates: 0 ms, 500 ms, and 800 ms, while using either of the proposed GUIs and without having any additional support. However, the results suggest that none of the proposed GUIs were significantly better in terms of performance and user experience than the condition without having any additional support.

This paper describes the effect on the listeners' experience of headphone listening to a music composition including inner-city sound while being in an inner-city environment, using a research through design approach. The study focuses on the listeners' described experiences through the lens of Berleant's aesthetic sensibility and Bull's phenomenon of the auditory bubble. We produce a composition which participants listen to in an urban context and discuss the two main themes found, soundtrack and awareness, together with the indications of the possibility to direct listeners' attention and level of immersion by including inner-city ambience and sound in music when listening with headphones in an urban environment.