Polyphonic Singing presented as a Multiplayer Classroom Online Game

National audienceThis paper proposes to use web technologies in a classroom environment, in order to help singers and/or instrumentalists of all levels read and perform polyphonic music. Recent tests in conservatoires and universities have proved that networked music performances of this sort can foster interest in music reading among various groups of music students. The application presented here, SmartVox, is hosted on a server, either run locally or via the internet. The server provides a web page accessible by the client through an IP address (e.g. smartkids.smartvox.eu), which the students type into the browser of their smart-phone. Students typically access the application together, in the same classroom-but each with his/her own device-and request the individual parts of the polyphony corresponding to their tessitura. The conductor's interface, a 2nd type of client (smartkids.smartvox.eu/conductor), controls the global state of the distributed application (e.g. play, pause...). The coupling of auditory and visual signals , as well as the ability to render and synchronize different parts on each performer's device makes solfège and various forms of elaborate contrapuntal musical situations accessible to untrained musicians