During this research phase of the MODEM project it is our aim to investigate online communities created to facilitate participation in musical collaboration. The results of the research are presented below. From this research we have proposed a model for the development of MODEM.

Collaborative music making on the internet has existed since it’s inception as a network for information exchange. Some of the first users of the internet were musicians who exchanged sheet music and MIDI files (digital sheet music for synthesisers) via FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

The first internet music collaborations were asynchronous, which means that the artists did not work on the same piece at the same time, but rather worked on part of the work (e.g. lyrics or a MIDI drum track) and sent part to the collaborator(s) for review and inclusion. By the mid 90s home computers had become powerful enough to allow professional standard editing of audio files (not just the simple note information from MIDI) and a new form of internet collaboration was emerging. Artists could record live instruments in their own studio and send the digital audio file to collaborators via the internet. This process mimics the production process that takes place in a conventional studio where several artists record tracks independently that are mixed together by the producer into the finished work. The crucial difference was that now the artists could easily be in different studios around the world without having to wait for a tape or CD to be delivered by courier.

In November 1994 Willy Henshall and Tim Brand formed ‘The Res Rocket Surfer Project’. “The first ‘virtual online band’ with 1,000 members that communicated through a mailing list and FTP server.” The Rocket Network was the first commercial asynchronous music collaboration network, developed by the Res Rocket team (see 1.1.2 below) and released in 1999.