On Designing, Composing and Performing Networked Collective Interactions

In this article, we discuss some of our research with Local Area Networks (LAN) in the context of sound installations or musical performances. Our systems, built on top of Web technologies, enable novel possibilities of collective and collaborative interaction, in particular by simplifying public access to the artwork by presenting the work through the web browser of their smartphone/tablet. Additionally, such a technical framework can be extended with so-called nano-computers, microprocessors and sensors. The infrastructure is completely agnostic as to how many clients are attached, or how they connect, which means that if the work is available in a public space, groups of friends, or even informally organised flash mobs, may engage with the work and perform the contents of the work at any time, and if available over the Internet, at any place. More than the technical details, the specific artistic directions or the supposed autonomy of the agents of our systems, this article focuses on how such ‘networks of devices’ interleave with the ‘network of humans’ composed of the people visiting the installation or participating in the concert. Indeed, we postulate that an important point in understanding and describing such proposals is to consider the relation between these two networks, the way they co-exist and entangle themselves through perception and action. To exemplify these ideas, we present a number of case studies, sound installations and concert works, very different in scope and artistic goal, and examine how this interaction is materialised from several standpoints.

R. Murray Schafer (1933–2021) and the World Soundscape Project

This in memoriam tribute for Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer focuses on his seminal work in establishing soundscape studies and the World Soundscape Project. It discusses his intellectual legacy in terms of emphasising a perceptually based approach and the importance of soundscape design, along with critical responses to his ideas.

Telematic Sound Body: A trajectory of intimacy and defiance

This article reflects on telematic soundwalking by initially considering the network as it is experienced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It uses learnings and writings about our networked lives (during COVID) to generate a framework in order to understand the artist’s pre-pandemic work; more specifically, in the context of a series of telematic soundwalking performances titled A Certain Geography, of which two case studies are presented here. The network is analysed through a diverse and cross-disciplinary selection of ideas and writings on networked cultures, experimental radio, listening, philosophy, anthropology and urban design. This cluster of diverse theoretical notions become important for the creation of a type of networked listening where the authorship of I often collapses into a polyphonic intimacy of voices and soundings affected by all that is taking place in between, including the distortions created by the materiality of technologies, the different layers of ecologies at stake, the words and voices of those who sound and listen remotely and site-specifically. It proposes an incomplete reception loop where the aspiration of walking on a planned trajectory is constantly contested and destabilised. The network becomes a porous space where the I constantly morphs into a convivial-collective action.

Musical Hyperrealism: Exploring Noah Creshevsky’s compositions through Jean Baudrillard’s ideas

While a familiar term in art history, philosophy and cultural studies, ‘hyperrealism’ is rarely applied to music. This is despite Noah Creshevsky’s use of the term to describe his unique compositional process and aesthetic approach. A composer of electroacoustic music and founder of the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music, Creshevsky has described his musical hyperrealism as a ‘language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment (“realism”), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive (“hyper”)’. In this article, I summarise the ideas behind Creshevsky’s hyperreal music and compare them to philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s theorisation of the hyperreal. Numerous similarities between Creshevsky and Baudrillard’s ideas will be made evident. The first half of this article focuses on Creshevsky’s sampling of sounds as ‘simulacra’ and how the interweaving textures and melodies that Creshevsky makes out of these samples are similar to ‘simulations’. In the article’s second half, Creshevsky’s creation of disembodied ‘superperformers’ is addressed and related to Baudrillard’s transhumanism. Towards the end of the article, Creshevsky’s aesthetic more broadly and what he calls ‘hyperdrama’ are linked to Baudrillard’s ‘transaesthetics’, before a concluding note addressing Baudrillard and Creshevsky’s different dispositions towards hyperrealism.

instance: Soma-based multi-user interaction design for the telematic sonic arts

The telematic work instance is a performance for viola and dance that digitally connects performers in Vancouver and Cape Town. The network interface enables a violist and a dancer to simultaneously play multi-user digital music-dance instruments over the internet with music and dance. The composition, design and performance interaction of instance draw from acoustic multi-user instrument paradigms and music-dance interactions in the African performing arts to explore the idiosyncrasies of the telematic performance space. The iterative design process implements soma-based research methods to inspire sonic compositional material with the body and to explore the performers’ embodied experience of sonic aesthetics during their interaction.

Improvising Inside a House of Cards: New performance and music-making through a collective networked instrument

This article presents experiences and reflections related to performing improvised, live processed electroacoustic music within a context of networked music performance. The musical interaction is performed through a new collective networked instrument, and we report how the ensemble ‘Magnify the Sound’, consisting of two of the authors of this article, meets the instrument in different networked performance situations, and how this is related to the affordance of the instrument. In our performances the network is inherent to our artistic practice, and we experience a phenomenological and somatic transformation in our roles as musicians, from individual instrumentality to shared instrumentality. The instrument invites new forms of music-making and contributes in fundamental ways to the ensemble’s musical communication and artistic expression. In the present article we outline our methods of working artistically with the networked instrument, and we point at some artistic results. We then discuss how the collective instrument has facilitated new performance and musical practice within the network.