Jay Hardesty, Drazen Bosnjak and Harris Skibell are developing tone23, a musical ecosystem where music is the primary agent defining interactions between users. Music evolves in this environment based on the musical preferences and encounters of users. Implemented at hive23 in Second Life, it creates original music variations and hybrids based on association among avatars.

Music Rooms: The hive23 environment contains three rooms. Each room is associated with a separate musical stream that is determined by the avatars currently within that room. Each avatar is “tagged” with music they have chosen from a list of musical pieces, available outside the entrance to the three rooms. When an avatar enters or leaves a room, a new sequence of musical variations is produced for that room. These variations combine and rework parts from the songs identified with those avatars then inhabiting that room.

Music Analysis and Remixing: Each musical variation embodies harmonic and rhythmic manipulations that impose musical coherence on each combination of parts drawn from the songs worn by avatars within a particular room. These manipulations introduce variety into the note structure within each part, and the contrapuntal structure across parts, in order to make each remix unique.

Scenario: Each avatar will start by exploring each of the three rooms, encountering shifting populations of other avatars that are also exploring those spaces. Eventually each avatar would presumably spend increasing amounts of time within the room that most consistently produces musical output preferred by that avatar. This preference develops collectively as other particular avatars also increasingly spend time within that space. The shifting population of avatars in each room potentially evolves into a collective musical author with discernible musical preferences.

Other Applications: The rooms in Second Life could potentially be implemented as physical spaces in a club or art installation, where persons (each tagged with a particular song) take the place of the avatars. Or the rooms could be implemented as channels in a location-based multi-user application, tied to something like GPS navigation systems in cars. A driver following approximately the same route at roughly the same time each day would gradually settle on a particular channel, as other musically compatible drivers do likewise.

The rooms could also be seen as publishing spaces, for example, web pages where several advertising jingles coexist in the form of ongoing remixes that evolve increasing compatibility over time. The necessary ingredient for each of these applications is a music software engine that can create coherence and variety, on-the-fly, among unexpected combinations of musical inputs.

Implementation and Hosting: The music engine is a Smalltalk/Seaside/C++ based process that runs on a separate server. It receives requests via http from Linden scripts attached to Second Life objects. The server process calculates new remixes, renders MIDI-based scores into audio results via Quicktime, and streams the audio via Shoutcast servers to SL land parcels underlying each shared musical space. The music engine / web server is currently hosted on a four-core Intel Mac Pro.

Location in Second Life: The hive23 environment is located on the Second Life mainland at Mabinogion (190, 43, 63). Or it can be found within Second Life by searching Places for “hive23″. The software is currently in testing mode. The list of musical inputs currently available will be augmented over time, including the addition of musical results generated within the environment itself.

Web Site: A web site describing the environment, as well as an existing Croquet-based implementation can be found at: http://tone23.org. For a closer look at the music engine there’s a Seaside-based single-user remixer called Qtone online: http://tone23.org/qtone.