Composition for conductor and audience: new uses for mobile devices in the concert hall

Composition for Conductor and Audience is an audience interaction piece first performed for an audience of over seventy-five people in June of 2011. The audience becomes the orchestra in this composition as they control different musical variables using the touchscreen surfaces on their personal mobile devices. To the authors' knowledge this is the first concert piece for bi-directional networked interactivity on audience-owned mobile devices to ever be performed. Audience members participated using the iOS / Android application 'Control', a generic solution for creating touchscreen interfaces written by the first author. Over twenty members of the audience participated in the performance, using their personal devices to match gestures made by the conductor with corresponding gestures on their mobile devices.