Projects

FanField – a project led by Scott Jones Studio, is developing a crowd-response framework for live music and immersive environments, exploring how collective audience behaviour can be translated into creative outputs and shape live experiences in real time.

What if the crowd could become part of the show?

A crowd is more than thousands of individual people. It moves. It surges. It settles. It finds a rhythm. Thousands of people moving together. FanField turns those collective behaviours into a creative material.

FanField is a new crowd-response system that allows the shared energy of an audience to influence a live experience in real time. Using lightweight browser-based interaction and real-time systems from phones already in people’s pockets, FanField looks for patterns emerging across a crowd – movement, intensity, rhythm and moments of synchronised participation. Those patterns can become signals for lighting, sound, projection, screens, XR and other live systems. A crowd moving together might transform the visual environment. A sudden surge of energy could shift the sound or lighting. A moment of synchronisation across a venue could trigger something entirely new.

Most audience technology is designed to measure people: where they go, what they click, what they buy and how they behave. FanField asks a different question: What happens if we give that data back to the crowd?

Rather than profiling individuals, FanField looks for temporary patterns happening across the audience as a whole and individual interactions become part of a shared field. That field can then influence the environment around them – creating a feedback loop between audience, performer and space.

A Crowd API

A key strand of the project is the development of a Crowd API: a system that bridges between collective audience behaviour and the technologies used to create live experiences. Audiences connect through a lightweight browser-based experience, without needing to download an app or wear specialist hardware.

FanField interprets activity across participating devices and turns emerging crowd patterns into simple creative signals that can be used by existing live systems.

Those signals could control:

• Lighting and projection
• Live visuals and screens
• Sound and music
• Immersive environments
• XR experiences
• Stage systems
• Connected digital experiences

The project also builds on earlier R&D already underway through the separately funded Immersive Arts programme. This work investigated synchronisation parsing, audience calibration and real-time output translation, allowing the MusicFutures phase to focus on refinement, scalability and broader application.

Designed for participation, not surveillance

FanField is deliberately being developed around temporary, anonymised and aggregated participation. It isn’t interested in identifying who you are but what is happening between people. These collective signals can become part of the performance without creating persistent profiles of the individuals taking part.

Although FanField is being developed through live music, the underlying idea can extend much further. The same Crowd API could connect collective behaviour to festivals, immersive installations, sporting events, public spaces, broadcasts, XR environments and experiences distributed across multiple locations. A crowd in Liverpool could even influence an experience happening somewhere else.

The FanField project is one of two SME-led projects awarded funding from the MusicFutures Future Live Fan Experiences R&D challenge in collaboration with Liverpool Experience Campus to develop the next wave of live fan experience across music events.