A web-based system for collaborative electro-acoustic composition

This paper describes development of an online system for collaborative electro-acoustic music composition. Traditionally, software systems for music composition have been single user systems. As accessibility to the Internet has increased, some systems have been adapted so that musicians can produce collaborative work. However, many such systems are still based around the composition methods of the original single user systems. Various Service Oriented Architectures are emerging based on WebServices or GridServices and other Internet technologies for dynamically building systems out of distributed components. Many e-Science projects are using these architectures to build collaborative environments. The software described in this paper takes such concepts and tools from Service Oriented Architectures and e-Science, and applies them to develop software specifically for collaborative electro-acoustic composition on the Internet, allowing compositional tools and components to be published, discovered and used within a distributed environment. An objective is to explore and determine methods of composition appropriate for this environment.