Global music creation over the Internet

Presents a system under development that enables globally distributed interactive music creation, manipulation and presentation, all in real time. The system is based on the concept of a music stream, which is a sequence of building blocks that make up music. The client-server architecture of the system allows Internet users to download and to listen to the stream. On the other hand, it allows each user or software agent to introduce new musical building blocks (audio samples, musical events, etc.) to an already-existing music stream. The server merges these building blocks into a local music stream and distributes it to all of its clients and other connected music stream servers. The overall emergent result is a single distributed, but not fully homogeneous, music stream, which is slightly different for each participant due to distribution delays and local (spatial and temporal) merging solutions.