THE ONLINE GRAPHICAL COMMUNITY AS A POTENTIAL INTERFACE FOR INTERACTIVE MUSIC PERFORMANCE

The goal of this research project was to investigate a new medium for interactive and collaborative music: the online graphical community. Three different approaches were investigated in connecting the online community Second Life with the musical programming language Max/MSP. The first method used Jitter, an add-on to Max/MSP that processes visual data, to track in-world character motion. The second approach used the in-world scripting language, PHP, and Open Sound Control to parse and send character chat messages into Max/MSP. The final path used in-world scripting to add entries into a MySQL database that was then queried using Max/MSP. The final approach proved to be both the most efficient and user-friendly. This system has the potential to allow people from all over the world to create music together virtually. 1