Improvisation in Isolation: Quarentena Liv(r)e and Noise Symphony with the Playsound online music making tool Ariane S. Stolfi Universidade Federal do Sul da Bahia (UFSB) - Centro de Formação em Artes e Comunicação arianestolfi@ufsb.edu.br Diogo P. S. de Novais Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia da Bahia(IFBA) diogopereira@ifba.edu.br Mathieu Barthet Queen Mary UNiversity of London (QMUL) - Centre for Digital Media m.barthet@qmul.ac.uk ABSTRACT In this paper, we describe artistic practices with the web- based music making tool Playsound.space held over the last two years since the inception of the platform. After com- pleting a first design phase, which is documented in previ- ous publications, Playsound has been regularly used by the first author as her main musical instrument to perform in live improvisation contexts. The tool proved to be espe- cially useful during the quarantine period due to Covid-19 in Brazil, by enabling the musician (i) to take part in per- formances with other musicians through online gatherings, and (ii) to compose solo pieces from home leveraging crowd- sourced sounds. We review these endeavours and provide a critical analysis exploring some of the benefits of online music making and related challenges yet to tackle. The use of Playsound “in vivo”, in real artistic practices outside the laboratory, has enabled us to uncover playing strategies and user interface improvements which can inform the design of similar web-based music making tools. 1. INTRODUCTION Playsound.space 1 , a web-based tool for free music im- provisation[2], was started in 2017 and evolved based on feedback from user evaluations and practice-based research. From a musical perspective, the main objective of the first author in developing Playsound was to create a tool that could support her own musical practice. The main develop- ment stage occurred during her PhD, which was completed in 2019[14]; this focused on designing, implementing and evaluating, the interface, as described in previous publica- tions[15]. Since then, the tool has been used extensively by the first author and collaborators for teaching, music com- position and performances. The literature on new interfaces for musical expression (NIME) often focuses on the design and implementation of interfaces but longitudinal analyses of NIMEs based on 1 http://www.playsound.space Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Attribution: owner/author(s). Web Audio Conference WAC-2021, July 5–7, 2021, Barcelona, Spain. © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). real performative contexts outside the laboratory are less frequent [9]. The focus of this paper is to analyse how Playsound supported some performances that occurred over a two-year period between 2019 to 2020 and what lessons can be learned from these experiences. Different contexts are considered: online concerts, offline concerts, and composed pieces both in solo and in collaboration with other musicians such as with Female Laptop Orchestra and Orquestra Er- rante. Emphasis is made on two events, Quarentena Liv(r)e and Noise Symphony, which started after the quarantine im- posed by Covid. Online music making tools are particularly suitable for situations where social distance between performers is nec- essary due to a sanitary crisis. The quarantine taking place in Brazil and other countries created a necessity to use the online medium to gather people for work but also entertain- ment. In terms of music collaboration, this has been for the first author an opportunity to re-connect with musicians she used to play with in the past in S˜ ao Paulo 2 2. PLAYSOUND Playsound[15] is a web-based player that works with Cre- ative Commons audio samples provided by the Freesound platform. The main idea of the software was to provide a way to seek and play crowd-sourced sounds in real time, and to this end, keyword searches and spectrogram representa- tions were used to help performers find sounds they wish to play. Users can play multiple sounds simultaneously, perform loops, cuts, and change playback speed, panning and volume for each sound. The tool was developed mainly for playing in free improvisation contexts, where it is desir- able to support flexible rhythm, and not be constricted by a time grid as commonly found in digital audio workstations (DAWs). 3. MUSIC IMPROVISATION DURING LOCKDOWN USING PLAYSOUND In this section, we describe two performative events with Playsound which took place during the lockdown in 2020. Following practice-based research, the processes were doc- 2 The first author moved since in the State of Bahia, which is located 1900 kms away from S˜ ao Paulo, to become lecturer at her new institution.