Roundware is Halsey’s fault.

He is a musician and sound artist living outside Boston and has been working on Roundware in the context of his sound installations since 2007.  Roundware originated as the technical infrastructure for his sound art installation ROUND, on exhibit at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in mid-2008.  Roundware was expanded dramatically to include location-awareness and other benefits for Halsey’s 2010 exhibition Scapes at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA.  This piece allowed participants to augment the physical landscape of the museum’s sculpture park by leaving audio commentary in locations of their choosing for other participants to hear.

All of Halsey’s installations and musical performances make extensive use of spoken human voice recordings as musical elements, alongside traditional and electronic instruments. He collects these voices from otherwise uninvolved individuals whom he records in various locations, from museums to street corners to rock clubs.

Halsey also has a band, aesthetic evidence, with which he performs his music publicly, often including interactive performances in which he records audience members’ voices and uses those recordings improvisationally within songs.

Halsey’s website

Joe is a musician and expert developer.  He built the Scapes and Ocean Voices iPhone app clients for Roundware and is an amazing all-around tech guy.

Ben joined the Roundware team in 2011 and has been working on the server components with the goal of making Roundware more flexible and easier for other developers to use.  He is also an excellent guitarist and you can learn more about his musical exploits at Listen Faster.

Rob joins the team from a little town in the Netherlands as our Android expert.  He got involved in 2010 when he heard about the Ocean Voices project because he is an avid diver.  He offered to create an Android version of the Ocean Voices app, which was released in 2011.  He has since done amazing work creating the Mountain Ghosts and ROUND:Cambridge Android apps as well as working on the Android Roundware libraries. More about Rob at the Shuffled Bits website.

Mike is initial software architect and developer of the Roundware server.

In other words, without him, Roundware would be nothing more than an idea.  Mike has been involved with Roundware from day 1.  He randomly met Halsey at a Bring Your Own Voice event at the Aldrich Museum (the site of the original ROUND installation) before Halsey had even formulated the idea for ROUND.  As they both live in Boston, a friendship ensued and as ROUND began to progress from an artistic idea to a reality, Mike played an integral role in solving problems, answering questions and bringing it to fruition.

Since the original installation, Mike has continued to improve and further stabilize the code while also bringing to life Halsey’s ever-evolving artistic ideas; not an easy task!

When he is not working on Roundware, Mike is seldom bored, amusing himself with projects ranging from a bicycle karaoke machine to a fully functional trebuchet.