Interactive Parallax Scrolling Score Interface for Composed Networked Improvisation

ABSTRACT This paper describes the Parallaxis Score System, part of the authors ongoing research into to the development of technological tools that foster creative interactions between improvising musicians and predefined instructional texts. The Parallaxis platform places these texts within a networked, interactive environment with a generalised set of controls in order to explore and devise ontologies of network performance. As an interactive tool involved in music production the score system itself undergoes a functional transformation and becomes a distributed meta-instrument in its own right, independent from, yet intrinsically connected to those instruments held by the performers. Keywords NIME, NetScore, Realtime Web, FOSS, Improvisation, Composition PARALLAXIS SCORE SERVER The Parallax Score Server (PSS) is a networked score playout system targeted at human performers who interpret notational instructions from the web-browser. It is a multinodal server managed network with each performer's browser a node, these scores are tightly synchronised with one another over the network using realtime web technologies. Written as a web-app, no special software is needed to use the screen score it will run in any standards compliant web browser This score playback system adopts a familiar[5], horizontal right to left, scrolling score paradigm, including a visual "playzone" and "playhead". The novel feature of this system is that each of the performance parts within the score can proceed at different speeds from one another. The multiple procession speeds of the individual parts result in a sonic equivalent to the parallax scrolling animation effect used in early side scrolling 8-bit video games such as Super Mario Brothers where the differing speed of the foreground and background give the impression of 3D depth in a two dimensional representation. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. NIME'14, June 30 -July 03, 2014, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Copyright remains with the author(s). The relative starting speeds of the parts are flexible and these relationships are malleable during a performance. The score does not function as a fixed set of relationships that must be maintained but as fluid document which encourages intervention. The system is a type of open form score but unlike the hypertextual or mobile forms seen in Stockhausen's Klavierstuck XI, Boulez's Troisieme Sonate, Formant III, Constellation / Constellation-miroir or more contemporaneously in the generative and network scores of The synchronisation between the individual score instances is achieved through bi-directional communications between the score clients and the score server. This network of multiple bidirectional links allows multiple forms of interaction to take place. The score may be approached according to a traditional top down hierarchical model where a master control interface has individual control over each of the scores. In such a scenario a director of a performance "conducts" by altering the speed of the different performers and subsequently alters the temporal relationship between the parts. Alternately, the individual nodes (performers) may exert agency and interfere with both the progression of their own part as well as that of their co-performers. These interventions may represent an act of subversion within the director based system or provide an opportunity to explore new structures and strategies in distributed performance systems. Once the performers are aware of the systems capabilities in this area, pre-performance discussions around version development may extend to incorporating game like strategies as typified in pieces such as John Zorn's Cobra. SCORE AS META-INSTRUMENT The network synchronised score allows nonstandard spatial arrangements of the ensemble around (and beyond) the performance space as maintaining eye contact with a conductor or each other may become less relevant. The spatial arrangement becomes one of the pre-performance compositional decisions to be made by the ensemble in creation o