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Sam Vance-Law
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I’ve been thinking for a while now about how we might be able to create music democratically. Where voting choices could be built into musical instruments. Where the resulting music could be collectively owned.  

What follows is a set of prototypes for communal composition. Models for how large groups of people might create and own music together using democratic decision making. Each one explores a different mechanism: averaging, spatial voting, electoral systems, embodied representation. They are working demonstrations.

Here are links to the main index for this project, A Guide to Democracy in Music explaining what it’s all about, and the GitHub repository. It’s open source so feel free to take anything you like and run with it.

None of these are finished pieces of music. They are instruments you can play with. All of them are single player for now (though they all have ways of tallying votes). Hope you enjoy them.

Piano

Democratic Instrument A digital piano that only works with two or more players. Everyone picks a note; you hear the most popular choice, or a chord of the top votes.

Play here

Miro

Spatial Voting A shared canvas where each touch becomes a vote. Overlapping choices form peaks in a 3D landscape. The topography can be played, becoming sound. Inspired by Miró's Bleu II.

Play here

Mean Mode

Continuous Pitch Like the piano, but on a continuous pitch line. You can watch the collective swing from one position to another, and hear it as the mean, the most popular bin, or a chord.

Play here

Assembly

Layered Composition Five layers (rhythm, bass, chords, melody, texture), four variations each. Like a Musikalische Würfelspiel of the 1700s, but the audience votes instead of rolling dice.

Play here

Parliament

Redistricting Electoral systems applied to musical composition. Five seats elected from five districts, 160 fixed voters. Drag the seeds, redraw the districts, and hear the parliament shift.

Play here

Choreography

Body as Instrument Democracy as physical representation in space. Cameras track dancers' movements and transcribe them into sound in real time. Dancers become co-composers in works that are new every single time.

Play here