Jam Tomorrow: Collaborative Music Generation in Croquet Using OpenAL Florian Thalmann thalmann@students.unibe.ch Markus Gaelli gaelli@iam.unibe.ch Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, University of Bern Neubr¨ uckstrasse 10, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland Abstract 1 We propose a music generation software that allows large numbers of users to collaborate. In a virtual world, groups of users generate music simultaneously at different places in a room. This can be realized using OpenAL sound sources. The generated musical pieces have to be modi- fiable while they are playing and all collaborating users should immediately see and hear the results of such mod- ifications. We are testing these concepts within Croquet by implementinga software called Jam Tomorrow. 1. Introduction “It’s very good jam” said the Queen. “Well, I don’t want any today, at any rate.” “You couldn’t have it if you did want it,” the Queen said. “The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today.” “It must come sometimes to ‘jam today,”’Alice objected. “No it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day; today isn’t any other day, you know.” “I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “It’s dread- fully confusing.” Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1871. Even though the idea of collaborative music generation on computer networks is almost thirty years old, today there are only a few projects in this domain [15]. Improvisation over the web has always been technically constrained, due to traffic limitations and synchronicity problems, but is now possible using MIDI [3] and even using compressed au- dio [14]. There are also projects about collaborative com- 1 Fourth International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collab- orating through Computing (C5’06) pages 73–78 posing [15] [13] [1] or collaborative open source record- ing [12]. People using such compositional or improvisa- tional software are restricted to working on one musical piece at a time. Our idea is to develop a software that lets users collaborate in generating multiple musical pieces si- multaneously within a modern virtual world. People using this software will have compositional and improvisational possibilities. In this paper, we start by presenting our conceptual ideas. In section 3 we explain the technology we use for our explo- rative project, Jam Tomorrow. We continue in section 4 by giving you a more detailed description of the musical con- cept and the architecture of Jam Tomorrow. In the same sec- tion we describe the major problems we encountered during implementation. Finally, we conclude by discussing future work. 2. Concept: Multiple Musicians in One Virtual Room Our idea is to build an application that consists of sev- eral similar musical editors (graphical user interfaces) dis- tributed within a virtual room. Each of these editors is linked to a musical piece and can be used as an interface for modifying it. The corresponding musical piece is heard from a sound source located at the editor’s position. The virtual room is visited by multiple users, which can move around freely between the editors. Depending on a user’s distance from an editor, volume and panning of this editor’s music changes. So, a user can find the editor of the music he is interested in, simply by following sound sources. Every user can use any editor. If somebody modifies a musical piece, this has to be immediately audible to all users near its editor. Of course, this constrains the musical possi- bilities a lot. For our ideas of such a flexible and collabora- tive music, see section 4.2.