Ariane S Stolfi (Universidade Federal do Sul da Bahia)*; Diogo Pereira (Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia da Bahia); Mathieu Barthet (QMUL)

In this paper, we describe artistic practices with the web-based music making tool Playsound.space held over the last two years since the inception of the platform. After completing a first design phase, which is documented in previous publications, Playsound has been regularly used by the first author as her main musical instrument to perform in live improvisation contexts. The tool proved to be especially useful during the quarantine period due to Covid-19 in Brazil, by enabling the musician (i) to take part in performances with other musicians through online gatherings, and (ii) to compose solo pieces from home leveraging crowd-sourced sounds. We review these endeavours and provide a critical analysis exploring some of the benefits of online music making and related challenges yet to tackle. The use of Playsound “in vivo”, in real artistic practices outside the laboratory, has enabled us to uncover playing strategies and user interface improvements which can inform the design of similar web-based music making tools.