Experiencing Online Orchestra: Communities, connections and music-making through telematic performance (original) (raw)
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Online Orchestra: Connecting remote communities through music
Journal of Music, Technology and Education, 2017
Online Orchestra is a telematic performance project, aimed at enabling young and amateur musicians in geographically remote locations to make music together over the Internet. This article describes the contexts out of which the project emerged, including an overview of the benefits of ensemble performance, and a survey of precedent telematic performance projects. It goes on to describe how the starting premises of Online Orchestra respond to these contexts and ends with a summary of Online Orchestra's approach, and its key findings. The article describes in particular how many recent telematic performance projects rely on specialist networks and equipment, and that alternative design solutions are necessary, and possible, in order to reach young and amateur musicians in their own remote locations.
Frontiers in Psychology
At the beginning of the pandemic, many music ensembles had to stop their activities due to the confinement. While some found creative ways to start making music again with the help of technologies, the transition from “real” rehearsals to “online” rehearsals was challenging, especially among older amateur musicians. The aim of this case study was to examine the effects of this transition on three community band conductors and three older amateur musicians. Specific objectives were to explore (1) intergenerational relationships to support online group music-making; (2) digital literacy and access in later life; and (3) online music-making in a COVID-19 context. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and theoretical thematic analysis was undertaken (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Results were analyzed from the conductors’ and older musicians’ perspectives, and common trends were combined to facilitate interpretation. The first theme showed that being part of an intergenerational ensemble...
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.
bf-pd: Enabling Mediated Communication and Cooperation in Improvised Digital Orchestras
2017
Digital musical instruments enable new musical collaboration possibilities, extending those of acoustic ensembles. However, the use of these new possibilities remains constrained due to a lack of a common terminology and technical framework for implementing them. Bf-pd is a new software library built in the PureData (Pd) language which enables communication and cooperation between digital instruments. It is based on the BOEUF conceptual framework which consists of a classification of modes of collaboration used in collective music performance, and a set of components which affords them. Bf-pd can be integrated into any digital instrument built in Pd, and provides a “collaboration window” from which musicians can easily view each others’ activity and share control of instrument parameters and other musical data. We evaluate the implementation and design of bf-pd through workshops and a preliminary study and discuss its impact on collaboration within improvised ensembles of digital in...
2021
We present a report of the experience of our remote musical collaboration during the Covid19 pandemic regarding live electronic, audiovisual compositions, and telematic performance in the context of the project Sound Notebooks. We discuss the problems found and the solutions adopted in the performances, as well as the hypotheses of musical research raised by the remote environment. We argue that the variety of expressive modes, sonic modalities, and video possibilities in the Sound Notebooks repertoire we presented contributes to the construction of an aesthetics for remote performance. We additionally address practical and conceptual questions involving the composition, performance, and technical issues of the networked environment. We conceived of the environments for the remote performances through a relationship to the technical needs of the repertoire. We conclude with a brief discussion of the differences between live electronic concerts in physical and telematic spaces. Telem...
Our Virtual Tribe: Sustaining and Enhancing Community via Online Music Improvisation
Frontiers in Psychology, 2021
This article documents experiences of Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra’s virtual, synchronous improvisation sessions during COVID-19 pandemic via interviews with 29 participants. Sessions included an international, gender balanced, and cross generational group of over 70 musicians all of whom were living under conditions of social distancing. All sessions were recorded using Zoom software. After 3 months of twice weekly improvisation sessions, 29 interviews with participants were undertaken, recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Key themes include how the sessions provided opportunities for artistic development, enhanced mood, reduced feelings of isolation, and sustained and developed community. Particular attention is placed upon how improvisation as a universal, real time, social, and collaborative process facilitates interaction, allowing the technological affordances of software (latencies, sound quality, and gallery/speaker view) and hardware (laptop, tablet, instruments, microphon...
Representing Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century
This article examines how ideas about music and music listening are articulated and what listening practices are constructed when symphony orchestras provide concert performances through streaming services. This is achieved by paying attention to how listening situations connected to symphony orchestras’ digital performances are characterized, how the audience is positioned in relation to the performances and the involved musicians, and furthermore to how the music is represented in text, images and verbal statements. The empirical data comprises the streaming service platforms, and supporting materials, of two concert institutions, London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (GSO), and was gathered during spring 2020, i.e. when concert halls were closed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The article demonstrates how online listening practices are characterized as disconnected from constraints of time and space, and free for anyone to use, anytime and for al...
Global Hyperorgan: a platform for telematic musicking and research
2021
The Global Hyperorgan is an intercontinental, creative space for acoustic musicking. Existing pipe organs around the world are networked for real-time, geographically-distant performance, with performers utilizing instruments and other input devices to collaborate musically through the voices of the pipes in each location. A pilot study was carried out in January 2021, connecting two large pipe organs in Pitea, Sweden, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. A quartet of performers tested the Global Hyperorgan’s capacities for telematic musicking through a series of pieces. The concept of modularity is useful when considering the artistic challenges and possibilities of the Global Hyperorgan. We observe how the modular system utilized in the pilot study afforded multiple experiences of shared instrumentality from which new, synthetic voices emerge. As a long-term technological, artistic and social research project, the Global Hyperorgan offers a platform for exploring technology, agency, vo...
High Performance Networking, 1998
This paper proposes a platform for musical sessions distributed over the Internet and for music development and engineering. The system is based on a distributed software architecture and it's universally accessible through a simple http-client (a browser). Orchestra! is a service that offers a common working environment and tools to the users, as well as a platform that provides a layer of common functionality for existing musical and groupware tools and for the development of new ones. The main challenge of Orchestra! is to offer an useful and appealing service with little resources required on the client's side (i.e. a sound card and a browser) while providing an appreciable solution to the typical problems of collaborative realtime applications over the Internet, within the limits of this particular case and its requirements : musical group synchronisation. As it is well known, packet-switched network's delays make impossible to reach a musical synchronisation among all members of a virtual group when each one is connected to the others. Nevertheless, by conjugating the ideas of hierarchical The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect. This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: