Online Communities for Web-Based Sound Art

The web-based sound art scene is relatively fragmented. There is no singular platform, forum, or other online community where a majority of such artists congregate. Even considering “web-based sound art” as a label, net.art, internet art, born-digital art, creative coding, live coding, and algorave all are also labels used by communities that create and exchange this work.

This is by no means a negative thing. It is actually quite the opposite. Web-based sound art, in all of its forms, is an emerging media with no single artist, aesthetic, or technical tool leading the charge. Rather than looking at individual artists or works of web-based sound art (as we do in previous articles), this article takes a look at the online communities where these works of art are debuted and exchanged. Beginning first with the most obvious online communities for music (social media), we’ll see how the plethora of music production tutorials uploaded on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have produced a web-based sub genre of tutorial-core music. After that, we will go one layer deeper, looking at nota e.V. and Audius, two very different digital-born communities that use online space (and also web3 technology) as a premise for an alternative form of community building. Finally, we will end with a self-ethnography, looking at WebSoundArt, as well as Browser Sound (my own community for web-based music).