This study evaluates a system designed for large-scale collective music sessions, aiming to answer how it performs and how it is perceived by the musicians using it. A music system was developed and an experiment was conducted with 96 participants playing together, using their smartphones as musical instruments. A musical director controlled the pitches for all instruments using a MIDI keyboard. A set of mixed methods was employed to contribute knowledge to improve the design of such systems and to better understand how musicians experience being part of a music session like this. The session was recorded and analyzed, and data from an evaluation form were examined using descriptive statistics and correlation analysis. The result confirms that web technologies are a contributing factor to rapid onboarding, and the musicians were very positive when describing the session. The result shows significant correlations between several sentiments reported by the participants. The authors also conclude that achieving a pleasing musical result is possible even when conditions are not always ideal and that several aspects of how the music session is composed and prepared contribute to an engaging experience for the crowd.
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