Do you have any examples of musical experimental crowd participation?

Question

I'm coming up with some ideas of my own and am writing an article about it. I'm especially looking for innovative or successful crowd participation and it would be nice if the bands are popular, but this is not necessary.

Answer 1

I was at a show in Minneapolis and the band was The Umbrella Sequence and they did a cover of A Flock of Seagulls "I Ran". While they did this song they had a Twister contest. They had people who wanted to play Twister come forward and they played during the song. The last person won the mat.

I've heard of Phish throwing beach balls into the audience and playing in time to how the balls bounced in the crowd.

Answer 2

The Flaming Lips used to do concerts where they would hand out a FM receiver and headphones to the attendees an broadcast additional sound/noises through it.

They also did parking lot experiments where they would get 40 or so cars together in a parking garage, give the car owners a tape (each tape had different music on it), and the different tapes would be played simultaneously to create a song or soundscape depending on what was on the tape. They also did this with boomboxes in small clubs.

They also released a 4 CD set, Zaireeka, that required all 4 discs to be played simultaneously, to fully "experience" the album.

hope that's what you were looking for.

Answer 3

Milgram's 37 (We Do What We're Told) from Peter Gabriel's So was borne from such participation. Apparently, Gabriel used to demonstrate (in a tangential way) during live performances what Stanley Milgram discovered about obedience from the social experiments Milgram conducted in the early 1960's.