Report - Mr. White: A Musical and Gaming experience
by Giorgio Zangarini
Mr. White by Livia Malossi Bottignole is a game piece, a genre of experimental music that can be considered as controlled improvisation. Mr. White is inspired by the game ‘Undercover’, a social deduction game that models a conflict between two groups: a minority (the Undercover), and a majority (the Civilians). At the start of the game, each musician is secretly assigned a role affiliated with one of these teams and a secret musical material, which is the only clue for them to discover their identities and oust their enemies. The game has two alternating phases: first, a day role, during which they must carefully give away information about their fragment to try to find out who is on their team and who isn’t, and second, a night role, in which players debate the identities of players and vote to eliminate a suspect. Through multiple rounds of elimination, they will discover their own identities and oust their enemies. Rounds are shown also to the audience via projections and images, who are the only ones aware of all the identities of the players. A web server, developed by Giorgio Zangarini, is used as a tool for distributing the musical materials between the musicians and for the communication between the musicians and the conductor.
This piece can be played by a maximum of twelve musicians, and the length of the piece is not predetermined and can be set by the ensemble. While working on the piece, the creative team realized that there was a demand from musicians to explore and build new skills in game pieces and controlled improvisation works. Therefore the project team has developed a workshop series to explore effective improvisation and 'playfulness' as a directive for performers, and hopes to explore social dynamics and communication through music and non-verbal means.
Research by Giorgio Zangarini: The creation of a Web Server for the Mr.White project
The Mr.White game piece required a system to enable communication between the musicians and the conductor. My idea was to create a Web server with the purpose of creating such a dialogue. The Web Server was created with NodeJs hosted inside a Max patch. From the Max patch It’s possible to specify the IP address of the router/modem used and the port number. After the address and the port number are specified, the Web Server can be turned on from the patch and it will be accessible by all the people connected to the specific router/modem in use. The portion of the Max patch that is used to carry on the above tasks is shown below:
After the previous procedures are done, the server is running. The next step is to send the list of musicians to the server from the Max patch which will result in the creation of a number of html pages with the following URL: 192.168.1.34:4000/name of the musician Mr.White was performed with six musicians, hence there were six html pages one for each musician.
Below a image of the procedure required to send the actual list of musicians to the server:
Once the previous task is done, the conductor and the musicians can open their own html pages. Below are two images, the first one is showing the musician page of Michele and the other one is showing the conductor page:
The conductor must choose the difficulty of the game which, at the moment, it’s either easy or normal. After the conductor selects the game mode, each musician can press the “start” button on their page (if they press it before the conductor action, the page will simply refresh). Now the musicians will be presented with a musical fragment related to their team.
Below are three images, the first one is again Michele’s page with the musical fragment of the undercover team, the second one is Luis’s page with the musical fragment of the civilian team, and the last one is Steinn page (Mr.White) with a blank sheet:
As you can see, each musician has a button “vote” that will be used during the voting procedure at the end of the round. Meanwhile the conductor has the following page in front of him:
The Conductor has an overview of the situation during the game. He knows which musician is in which team and, as it will be shown later, he also sees the players eliminated from the game. Since I didn’t mention this earlier, each role and each musical fragment is chosen randomly by the server. Regarding the roles, the rule is the following: if, for instance, there are six musicians, half of them (three) are civilians while two are undercovers and one is Mr.White. At this moment of the game, the musicians are improvising over the musical fragments of their team (obviously they don’t know their team mates, they have to listen carefully to the others in order to eliminate their enemies during the voting procedure).
Once the conductor is satisfied with the performance, he can press the “End this round” button to end the round and go to the voting part of the game. Below, the html page of the conductor during the voting procedure:
The number of votes will increase as each musician votes. Here’s Michele’s page during the voting procedure:
Michele and all the other musicians have to press one of the buttons with the name of the player they want to eliminate. After the voting procedure, each musician will be notified that the procedure was successful like so:
When all the musicians have expressed their vote, the conductor must press the “go back” button in order to see the result of the votation and, at the same time, to start a new round.
Here’s the page of the conductor at this point of the game:
Steinn (Mr.White) is eliminated from the game. Each musician also has to press the “go back” button in order to get the new musical fragment for the next round. When Steinn goes back, the following page will be shown to him:
The game will go on until only one team survives. In this example, the Civilians won because Mr.White and all the Undercovers were eliminated. This is the conductor page at the end of the game:
Each musician will receive a message saying “you won!” or “you lost!”.
Personal considerations
In my opinion the system needs some improvements, here’s are the problems that must be fixed in the future:
1) When a player is eliminated from the game, the player name is still shown in the voting procedure of the next rounds. his/her name it's shown in red, which indicates that the player has been eliminated but the button is still clickable which means that, potentially, the same player can be eliminated more than once during the game. The musicians are instructed not to press the buttons shown in red during the voting procedure but mistakes can happen. The best solution would be to make the button disappear or make it unclickable.
2) When the game finishes, there is no way to play a new game without completely restarting the server. A solution would be to insert a button in the conductor page that can be pressed when the game is finished in order to start a new game. This sounds simple but it’s really not, because it will require the entire system to be restored to its default state without rebooting the server
3) This one is more of an improvement than an actual problem, I’m talking about the user interface. At the moment the GUI is pretty simple and straightforward. It will be nice to have a more fancy interface for the user. I’m also thinking about two graphical modes that the user could select. A “dark mode” and a “light mode”. At the moment, all the html pages are shown in white text on black background (“dark mode”) which is ideal in the context of concerts during the evening with soft lighting. But during the day it’s better for the musicians to have black text on white background which is the so-called “light mode” that I would like to implement in the future.
Finally, I have to thank the people of studio Loos, in particular Peter van Bergen, for giving me the opportunity to work on this research project in such a beautiful and stimulating environment.