Digital collaboration on an international scale, with the Dean Rodney Singers

I have been working recently on a great project with Heart n Soul, an organisation that works with artists with learning disabilities, and wanted to share a few thoughts about it here, as it turns out to have been the perfect conceptual testing ground for our work on digital collaboration.

The video above shows singer and rapper Dean Rodney explaining the core ideas in the project and is part of our attempt to make the case for a funding bid to the Arts Council's Unlimited fund. Dean's singular vision for the project has been a big part of what makes the project really exciting and ambitious, and it just so happens that I really love his music with The Fish Police.

My role has been to try to find a practical way to put together a global collaborative band with Dean, and have the band use shared tools on the web to create a whole bunch of tracks for the Olympics. We intend to draw in as many people as possible, whether they be future band members, active audiences or bystanders into the creative process. So far we've worked as a small unit at Heart n Soul, testing and interrogating different collaborative models, approaches to creativity and music tools which, it has to be said, is great way to spend time if that is your thing. But it also gave us a chance to get our thinking as strong and thought through as possible for the application.

I feel we found some really strong solutions. We aim to have musical units in seven countries, initially connected by the amazing web-based composition tool audiotool 2.0. The amazing thing about audiotool is that instead of having to distribute sound files and have people remix them with their own local (and probably different) software, we can actually make the core musical components available. Drum machines, synths and effects can all be modified - as can the the notes themselves, and the arrangement of music parts and layers.

Consequently, as well as the core band building tracks, any interested person can take Dean's initial music materials and develop them in their own way, but importantly, in a format that everyone else can also access.

I am really impressed by the openness of the approach audiotool has taken; we're definitely going to take as much advantage of it as possible. If you have five minutes to have a play, do so; I think it makes a pretty compelling case for the strength and capability of Flash - when it's really made to do what it does best.