Participatory musical improvisations with Playsound.space

Ariane Stolfi, Alessia Milo, Miguel Ceriani and Mathieu Barthet

Playsound.space is a web-based tool to search for and play Creative Commons licensed-sounds which can be applied to free improvisation, experimental music production and soundscape composition. It provides fast access to about 400k non-musical and musical sounds provided by Freesound and allows users to play/loop single or multiple sounds retrieved through text based search. Sound discovery is facilitated by use of semantic searches and sound visual representations (spectrograms). After a first version released and user tests conducted, we developed more features for audio processing and to enhance participation trough a chat system that allows users to share sound sessions and exchange messages while playing.