Mutant – Multiperspective Music

Mutant is a real time sound application that refers to the persist process of creation, reincarnation and transformation. It appeals to the sonic memories of the participants and let them dive into acoustic stories, like the sound of the sea, the woods, the streets. The interactive play with several players and different acoustic and synthetic instruments led to various situative soundtracks from multiple perspectives.

"Mutant - Multiperspective Music" - Winner of Giebichenstein Design Award in the cathegory "Most interesting Experiment"
https://www.burg-halle.de/hochschule/hochschulkultur/giebichenstein-designpreis/aktuelles/a/verleihung-der-giebichenstein-designpreise-1/

Various collaborative apps allow users to work online simultaneously on a document, code or track. Beside new tools that create compositions in conjunction with artificial intelligence, established digital interfaces are synchronizing devices and electronic instruments through collaborative data exchange.

The project explores what happens if two or more users create a piece of music together by listening to it at different speeds and in different keys. On this basis, various experiments were carried out to investigate the interaction and behaviour of several collaborating users, as well as searching for solutions and parameters to represent music in a multi-perspective approach.

Mutant's first prototype is a multiplayer application that enables users to create sound and music together. The app focus is the tesseract - a four-dimensional geometric shape, that serves as a metaphor for multiperspectivity. Its eight cells stand for eight different perspectives on the same piece of music, which differ in key and speed. The players can freely switch between these cells via a navigation system. In this way, people can interact in different cells and accordingly from different perspectives.

Mutant offers individual composition to be experienced from several musical perspectives and in different sound landscapes. The stylistic figure "Tesseract" and the cross-cell instrumentation give the possibility to listen to intuitively recorded loops directly in various keys and speeds. The creative process of Mutant led to different versions of the tesseract, which can be selected by the listener within the application similar to songs on a CD. In this sense, Mutant resembles an interactive music album in which each song has its own instrumentation, mood and dynamics. It becomes audible through inputs and interactions and can be interpreted individually or together.