Keitai

Ran into this fascinating project by Atau Tanaka of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. It’s called Malleable Mobile Music.

The system exploits ad-hoc wireless networks and mobility to allow a community of users to participate in the real-time creation of a single piece of music. Socially defined permissions define levels of access to the creative process and resulting music. This extends existing notions of creative commons towards a dynamic real time activity. It seeks to encourage music listening not as a passive act of consumption, instead proposing a proactive participative activity.

A PDF overview is available here. Also check out his Café Sound Life Paris experiement (”There are no playlists - music is associated with photographs.”)