City Symphonies: Massive Musical Collaboration

Thus far, the impact of crowdsourced and interactive music projects has been limited, with the public only a small part of a final musical result, and often disconnected from the artist leading the project. We believe that a new “musical ecology” is needed for true creative collaboration between experts and amateurs that benefits both. Toward this goal, we have been creating “city symphonies,” each collaboratively composed with an entire city. We have designed the necessary infrastructure, a variety of web-based music composition applications, a social media framework, and real-world community-building activities to bring together an unprecedented number of people from diverse backgrounds. We premiered the first of these symphonies in Toronto in March 2013, the second in Edinburgh in August 2013, and the most recent in Perth, Australia, in March 2014. This process establishes a new model for creating complex collaborations between experts and everyone else.