Huihui Cheng is a contemporary music composer whom I met when I was working at IRCAM. Later on, I had the chance to work on two of her pieces which actively involve the audience by asking them to participate in the concert through dedicated web applications. The applications roughly consist in series of mini musical games, manually synchronized by Huihui with the musicians playing live from a dedicated control interface.
The piece had already been composed and performed, and the web application already authored by my former IRCAM colleague Benjamin Matuszewski, using version 2 of IRCAM's soundworks framework. Huihui asked me if I could port it to an online version that would allow people to gather and play it in sync on their smartphones outside of a live concert situation, so all I did was just to fork the original version, add a few functionalities such as background music playing and automation of the live controls on the server, and push this new version online.
The piece has been edited on her portrait CD, and the game is accessible as a web app (only compatible with mobile browsers).
For this piece I had the opportunity to design the dedicated web application from the ground up. Fortunately, version 3 of the soundworks framework was out, so I used it together with VueJS to build the whole project. This time I wanted to create a single application that could be used both in a live concert situation and as a standalone game. Soundworks applications typically have a controller and a player page, respectively equivalent to an admin and a front page, so I designed the controller page as usual, allowing Huihui to control every parameter of the player in real-time, and added a "live mode" toggle. Now when the live mode is disabled (which is true most of the time), the controls have no effect and the player loads an automated version of the piece with synchronized background music.
The game is available as a web app (only compatible with mobile browsers).
