Interface Decoupled Applications for Geographically Displaced Collaboration in Music

In an interactive system designed to produce music, the sound synthesis engine and the user interface layer are fully integrated, but usually designed in parallel and in a modular way. Decoupling the interface layer from the synthesis engine, not only allows the use of best suited technologies and programming languages for each purpose, but also enhances the overall system flexibility. This paper discusses the idea behind a remote user interface and a processing engine that resides in a different host, taken to the most extreme situation in which a user can access the synthesizer from any place in the world using internet technology. This paradigm has promising applications in collaborative music creation systems for geographically displaced communities of user. The Public Sound Objects is an experimental system on which this concept is applied, and its currently under development at the Music Technology Group of the UPF in Barcelona.