The Mini[ ]Max Festival, The Powerhouse, Brisbane, 2002

When Farrell and Duckworth decided to create the virtual instruments, their goal was to give listeners an active role in the creative process by encouraging everyone who visited the Cathedral site to be both a listener and a performer. Additionally, they thought it was important to design instruments that had built-in levels of musicality so they could be played by people of any musical ability.

The most interactive of these instruments, the PitchWeb, was played by selecting and manipulating shapes mapped to sound samples and contained in multiple banks of 64 sounds each. Users could select individual sounds from the sound palette, move them to the playing field, and play them in any order and combination with movements of the computer mouse. These sound/shapes could also be resized and overlapped to create polyphonic passages, and in the CD-ROM version of the instrument the resulting sound patterns could be saved and reopened at another time.

On a simpler level, PitchWeb users could create music by typing in words or phrases in any language and having the instrument automatically convert them into musical sounds. While in its most complex form, the PitchWeb could be played directly on the computer keyboard, like a synthesizer. And with the on-line multi-user version of the instrument, performers could affect the composite sound individually, by having their changes updated instantly across the network and heard by everyone at the same time.