Piece for Smartphone Orchestra is a sound art work of indeterminate duration for any number of players. It expands on the idea of a system to produce a dynamic sound structure. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a system is "a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole". In Piece for Smartphone Orchestra the performers form the interacting group of items. They are distibuted among the audience and act according to a text score. The piece can be regarded as a potential aural game on beat tones and otoacoustic emission effects. The document DISCUSSION.md offers a more detailed account on the relationship between Piece for Smartphone Orchestra and systems.
Players use the smartphone to control a simple musical instrument. This is a software
synthesizer that can play three sine tones at 1244.507 Hz, 2489.014 Hz and 4978.031 Hz.
The synth is developed using web technologies. In particular, it is
a progressive web app that players
can add to their home screen and use offline. Sound is produced using the
Web Audio API.
Players can start/stop a tone by pressing a button. By rotating the device they control
the amplitude and frequency deviation of a playing tone.
The web app of Piece for Smartphone Orchestra can be found at https://tsmtzs.github.io/pieceForSmartphoneOrchestra.
The SuperCollider document pieceSimulation.scd can
generate an approximation of the resulting sound.
The software synthesizer of Piece for Smartphone Orchestra is a PWA. In particular, it is a three page website. The homepage offers a brief description of the piece. Two links direct the player to the text score and instrument pages.
The app is developed with the Astro web framework.
For more details about the application, please read the SOFTWARE-SETUP-GUIDE.md.
With all the required software installed, use a terminal to run
npm run buildfrom within the Piece for Smartphone Orchestra directory. Then start the server with
npm run preview
Piece for Smartphone Orchestra is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License except the code which is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.