Musicpainter : a collaborative composing environment

Abstract

This thesis presents the design and implementation of Musicpainter, a networked graphical composing environment that encourages sharing and collaboration within the composing process. Instead of building a computer-assisted composing tool, Musicpainter aims to provide a social environment where users can gather and learn from each other. Our approach is based on sharing and managing music creation in small and large scale. At the small scale, users are encouraged to begin composing by conceiving small musical ideas, such as melodic or rhythmic fragments, all of which are collected and made available to all users as a shared composing resource. The collection provides a dynamic source of composing material that can be directly reused and it inspires users with more ideas. At the large scale, users can access full compositions that are shared as open projects. Users can listen to and change any piece if they want. The system generates an attribution list on the edited piece and thus allows users to trace how a piece evolves in the environment. Shared resource and open projects form the foundation of the social environment, and they create an opportunity for users to compose in a collaborative manner. A pilot study is conducted to verify our design. Thirty users downloaded the program and contributed a total of 90 partial or complete compositions. The statistics of basic user usage, a summary of user survey, and an analysis of the compositions created by selected users are presented in the thesis.