Addressing the Network: Performative Strategies for Playing APART

Liminalities, A Journal of Performance Studies, 2014

The series of Internet based technological developments in recent decades affects and transforms so deeply our practices and perceptions that the very notion of auditorium cannot remain untouched and unscathed. What we discern as a listening space for production and reception of music and for sound propagation in space and in time is now overlapping the specific physical structures and architecture (concert halls, venues, esplanades, etc.) towards enlarged and invisible sensory enveloping forms: internet auditoriums. We have to examine those 'spaces': their architectural filiation with places and rooms, their plasticity for being built, planned, settled and landscaped for listening, their ability to locate and seize listeners and to be explored by sound productions designed to be listened to.

2003

(cont.) In order to addressee the latter challenge I have decided to employ the digital network--a promising candidate for bringing a unique added value to the musical experience of collaborative group playing.

Understanding the technical and creative complexities of networked music performance provides the starting point for the analysis of the 2014 Flight of the Sea Swallow collaboration between networked musicians in New York, USA, Sydney, Australia and Braunschweig, Germany. Performers interacted remotely by navigating a 3-D audiovisual environment with wristbands containing accelerometers, visualised as animated hands within the virtual space. Heat and light sensors in each location generated data that was visualised as coloured lighting states within the physical performance space, reflecting those characteristics of the dispersed performers sensate environments. Drawing on multimodality, with its focus on the construction of meaning across multiple communicative modes, this paper examines the relationship between performers dislocated, technologically mediated interaction and the ways in which this shaped their improvisatory musical experience. The analysis examines the interplay between different modes of action, demonstrating the role that the body plays in the performer’s relationship to the technology used and conceptualisation of their creative networked engagement.

Springer International Publishing eBooks, 2022

A Networked Music Performance (NMP) is defined as what happens when geographically displaced musicians interact together while connected via network. The first NMP experiments begun in the 1970s, however, only recently the development of network communication technologies has created the necessary infrastructure needed to successfully create an NMP. Moreover, the widespread adoption of network-based interactions during the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a renewed interest towards distant music-based interaction. In this chapter we present the Intelligent networked Music PERforMANce experiENCEs (IMPERMANENCE) as a comprehensive NMP framework that aims at creating a compelling performance experience for the musicians. In order to do this, we first develop the neTworkEd Music PErfoRmANCe rEsearch (TEMPERANCE) framework in order to understand which are the main needs of the participants in a NMP. Informed by these results we then develop IMPERMANENCE accordingly.

17th International Symposium on Electronic Art, 14th -21st September 2011, Istanbul, Turkey.

The study of interdisciplinary cross-cultural interaction in networked audiovisual performance serves as the starting point for Ethernet Orchestra’s 2010 telematic music improvisation and live cinema performance, Distant Presences. This paper outlines and technical facilitation of the performance, evaluation methodologies and the creative strategies employed by the dispersed musicians and visual artists to collaborate remotely.

Journal of The Audio Engineering Society, 2019

Considerable research has been conducted on network and system level metrics related to Network Music Performance (NMP). However, little empirical evidence is currently available for assessing the actual Quality of Musician’s Experience (QoME) over NMP. We propose a research framework that integrates both subjective and objective aspects of musicians’ experience, by explicitly considering the psychological state and profile of each musician, the environment acoustic variables, the music performance variables and the Quality of Service of the network as the key dimensions that impact QoME. We will use the proposed framework to drive empirical studies designed to explore the QoME of musicians performing over the Internet; this paper is a first step in this direction.

Journal of The Audio Engineering Society, 2020

In Network Music Performance (NMP), audio quality and audio delay are considered to be the most critical variables affecting the Quality of Musicians' Experience (QoME). In order to quantify the extent to which these parameters affect QoME, we executed a pilot study where eight musicians performed music in pairs in a controlled NMP setting and were asked to evaluate eight variables related to perception, while the end-to-end delay and the quality of the exchanged audio were varied. We present the design and execution of this experiment and discuss its results and their implications for the tolerance of musicians to increased delay and degraded audio quality.

2010

The evolution of networked audio technologies has created unprecedented opportunities for musicians to improvise with instrumentalists from a diverse range of cultures and disciplines. As network speeds increase and latency is consigned to history, tele-musical collaboration, and in particular improvisation will be shaped by new methodologies that respond to this potential. While networked technologies eliminate distance in physical space, for the remote improviser, this creates a liminality of experience through which their performance is mediated. As a first step in understanding the conditions arising from collaboration in networked audio platforms, this paper will examine selected case studies of improvisation in a variety of networked interfaces. The , , author will examine how platform characteristics and network conditions influence the process of collective improvisation and the methodologies musicians are employing to negotiate their networked experiences.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media …, 2003

Music today is more ubiquitous, accessible, and democratized than ever. Thanks to technologies such as high-end home studios, audio compression, and digital distribution, music now surrounds us in everyday life, almost every piece of music is a few minutes of download away, and almost any western musician, novice or expert, can compose, perform and distribute their music directly to their listeners from their home studios. But at the same time these technologies lead to some concerning social effects on the culture of ...

As broadband internet infrastructure continues to expand and data transfer tempts light speed, thus minimizing the critical issue of latency, the technical strategies and compositional methods of realtime network music performance evolve in tandem. The past twenty years have seen several waves of eager development followed by technical stagnation in the network music field. These waves are driven not only by advancements in technology but also by growing research and empirical data in telematic interaction.