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SMS Interactive Music System

S.I.M.S., the SMS Interactive Music System is a live interactive musical performance. SIMS brings together some of Sydney’s finest noise artists and musicians to perform with audiences across the east coast. No that is not a typo, performing with audiences is exactly what will happen. We have developed a system for audiences to control the texture and effects used by each musician during the performance. Audience members can send any of a pre-defined set of text messages to our computer system, which will then trigger that effect on our effects processor.

Why would we do this? Audience interaction within performance has a long history, from a comedian asking for a volunteer to come up on stage, to the good old fashion sing along. Within the realm of high tech/improvised/noise performance the audience has largely been kept passive and quiet.

Mobile phones are almost ubiquitous so for us they seemed a great tool for this interaction. The infrastructure is maintained by large telcos, and almost everyone has one so we thought we would give it a go.

The music is spontaneous, and performed by musicians with a lot of experience in improvised collaboration. However the sound of each performance is still controlled by the audience so how it sounds is up to you if you come along.

Another aim of our project was to make an easy to use system of SMS interaction for live performance and installation art. Our system triggers OSC signals on receipt of pre-defined text messages, OSC is a protocol understood by many live performance softwares. We are giving away all our hard work for free, so if you are interested in adding SMS interactivity to your work check out our technical page for downloads and detailed instructions.

The SIMS performance will be visiting you (if you live in Melbourne Sydney or Brisbane). Here are the tour details.