Audience participation has appeared prominently as a critical response to spectatorship in various artistic fields since the second half of the twentieth century. In music, a variety of participatory approaches have been developed that provide the audience with varying degrees of creative agency. Each approach fosters certain relationships and communications among the participants, giving rise to a range of social dynamics and politics. The objective of this dissertation was, first, to develop a new approach that involved audience members interacting with a limited number of objects placed in a concert space to affect sonic characteristics and the performance of an ensemble that consisted of featured musicians, and second, to analyze the social dynamics and politics such an approach gave rise to.

Literature and creative works in the fields of music, visual arts, and theater were used to develop a method of viewing and assessing the politics of participation that was used to critique the creative portion of this dissertation that took the form of two concerts of interactive music titled Space Within. The production of the concerts involved development of hardware and software to enable audience interaction and mediation between the participants and the ensemble. Scenic, lighting and projection design also played important roles in facilitating these aspects.

Several members of the audience were interviewed following the concerts while others were asked to respond to a survey to understand how they perceived their roles in the concerts and their impression of the social dynamics the event fostered. While most of them felt that their presence was consequential in the sonic outcome, not all of them were certain how exactly they affected the outcome. I conclude that while the audience may not have “co-authored” the sounds heard during the event, the event was successful in drawing their attention to and persuading them to reconsider their roles in a musical context.