Website makes music by masses

A new website named CrowdSound is conducting a huge musical experiment by asking strangers to come together to write a song. Photo / Thinkstock

Crowdsourcing platforms have been used for everything from playing Pokemon to planet-hunting and now one is making music.

A new website named CrowdSound is conducting a huge musical experiment by asking strangers to come together to write a song. A melody is being generated on the site, note by note, in real-time, by getting people to vote on the next note in the tune. The crowd decides how the song evolves and how it ends.

More than 38,000 people from 141 countries have helped create the melody, and the creators plan to crowdsource lyrics.

It's a simple process: visit the page, listen to the music created so far and select which note you think should come next. Once the system collects 100 votes, it moves on to the next note.

To make sure the song didn't turn into a complete hodgepodge of sounds, it was given a basic musical structure by its creator, programmer Brandon Ferris.

Despite being composed over months by thousands of people around the world, the melody is pretty tuneful, and even hummable - though slightly predictable. Up the tempo and the melody becomes more catchy.

This isn't the first time musicians have tried to use the wisdom of the crowd for their compositions.

In 2013, Swedish DJ Avicii asked people to submit and vote on sounds, with the top choices incorporated into the song X You.

In Detroit, Michigan, MIT composer Tod Machover and the city orchestra asked residents to contribute locally found noises, like the rev of a Mustang's engine or a morning market, to a collaborative symphony. The final composition, due to premiere on November 20, will stitch the sounds together into a musical piece that reflects the city.

The CrowdSound song is currently up to the conclusion part, and there are fewer than 100 notes left to vote on. If you want to know what a song composed by humanity sounds like - and you'd like to contribute your musical vote, visit crowdsound.net.