The Human Music Show: Crowd-Prompting as a Playable Social Interface for Generative Live Performance

Manaswi Mishra, and Antonis Christou

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

We present The Human Music Show, a satirical participatory AI music performance and commentary on the hyper-commercialization of musical artifacts featuring audience participation and a melding of the traditions of live-coding, DJing, and instrumental virtuosity. Prompting, which has emerged as the dominant control paradigm in commercial AI music tools, is reimagined here away from its usually solipsistic and solitary context, and instead as a way to integrate the collective will of the crowd and greater musical community into one cohesive musical whole. As part of our novel performance paradigm, we introduce “crowdprompting”, where audience feedback via software is turned live into generated AI samples, which are then chopped and rearranged by the human performers and hosts of the show. Through this performance we present a new paradigm of collective generative music performance in three stages (A) the CrowdPrompting - a mobile web interaction to collect live audience opinion on musical ideas and prompts (B) a novel real-time steerable music generation interface that turns crowd input into sample material and (C) the Human performers / hosts re-interpreting this generated musical artifacts through the practice of live-coding.

Citation

Manaswi Mishra, and Antonis Christou. 2026. The Human Music Show: Crowd-Prompting as a Playable Social Interface for Generative Live Performance. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20782172 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_music_47,
 abstract = {We present The Human Music Show, a satirical participatory AI music performance and commentary on the hyper-commercialization of musical artifacts featuring audience participation and a melding of the traditions of live-coding, DJing, and instrumental virtuosity. Prompting, which has emerged as the dominant control paradigm in commercial AI music tools, is reimagined here away from its usually solipsistic and solitary context, and instead as a way to integrate the collective will of the crowd and greater musical community into one cohesive musical whole. As part of our novel performance paradigm, we introduce “crowdprompting”, where audience feedback via software is turned live into generated AI samples, which are then chopped and rearranged by the human performers and hosts of the show. Through this performance we present a new paradigm of collective generative music performance in three stages (A) the CrowdPrompting - a mobile web interaction to collect live audience opinion on musical ideas and prompts (B) a novel real-time steerable music generation interface that turns crowd input into sample material and (C) the Human performers / hosts re-interpreting this generated musical artifacts through the practice of live-coding.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {47},
 author = {Manaswi Mishra and Antonis Christou},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20782172},
 editor = {Lia Mice and Nicole Robson and Tara Pattenden},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {Live Performance},
 numpages = {4},
 pages = {197--200},
 presentation-video = {https://vimeo.com/1164587954},
 title = {The Human Music Show: Crowd-Prompting as a Playable Social Interface for Generative Live Performance},
 track = {Music},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_music_47.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}