Over the Understory
Remember that YouTube Orchestra announcement? I remember reading the title and getting all giddy over the idea of a hugely interactive, distributed orchestral experiment. And then it turned out to pretty much be a glorified video audition. Ever since I’ve had a little collaborative-music shaped hole.
Well I just discovered this, which is so much more awesome, despite the no frills webpage and MS Paint style frontend. It doesn’t quite fill the hole, but it’s helping to wad up the edges.
The concept is that users submit loops all at 180bpm (or a sensible fraction of that number, 180 is chosen so it’s nicely divisible). When you go to the “listen” page, the site chooses several of these loops with similar harmonic keys and mixes them together. As you listen to the loops being played, they are randomly swapped with others, and the likelihood of being swapped is based on the current rating of the loop.
It’s obviously in a really early stage, but it’s well promising.
