We did our first Sound Kitchen performance in 2015 (as part of the Prague Quadrennial). To date, this remains one of FLO’s favourite places to perform (both in-person and telematically) for 2 reasons: 1) Sound Kitchen rocks!!! It brings together such a variety of super-talented sound folks from around the globe, and 2) The team curating and volunteering at Sound Kitchen events (which falls under OISTAT Sound Design Sub-Commission) also rocks!!! They are the nicest people you could ever meet and make the event what it really is! A melting pot of different cultures, languages, points of view and ways of artistic expression, glued together by true passion for all things sound-related, be it sound design for theatre, performance, installation, broadcast or else!
During the pandemic, FLO developed a framework for performing entirely remotely (as that was the only way to do an actual performance during lockdown!). When things eased up and new dates for WSD and Sound Kitchen were announced, we got in touch with our friends from the Ethernet Orchestra and did a performance collaboration titled EO+FLO: Telematic City Jam – Calgary. We reached out to Robin Whittaker from TiMax, who kindly agreed to do a few rehearsals with us from his multichannel studio in the UK, and, armed with the knowledge of erm … who will play which instrument (STC of course), created a plan for immersive spatialisation.
The performance went without a hitch, and the audience loved the telematic/ immersive aspect of the experience (as well as everyone coming online to say hello from different parts of the world and talk about the setup and instrumentation), so we thought, hmmm … how can we push this format further for the performance at Sound Kitchen in 2023 by adding visuals???
As it turns out, the audio output can be routed from SonoBus to Touch Designer, which can be programmed to create visuals reacting to this audio input in real-time. These visuals can also be further manipulated during the performance using a MIDI controller, and the audiovisual output of the full performance can be streamed via OBS to the FLO YouTube channel.
So, while the Sound Kitchen audience was sitting in the Divadlo Inspirace, a stage studio of HAMU (Academy of Performing Arts in Prague), located in the basement of the Liechtenstein Palace on Malostranské náměstí in Prague, and watching the visuals of the FLO performance, Robin Whittaker was quietly sitting at the back of the venue, grabbing separate audio stems of the performance from his local instance of SonoBus, feeding that into TiMax software and hardware, and, without breaking a sweat, spatialising the performance into multiple speakers located in the venue to create a fully immersive audio experience. Yep, that happened! And yep, it went without a hitch due to ‘visual wizz’ Roser and ‘immersive wizz’ Robin! The rest of us just enjoyed playing and loving every minute of it!
Here are some photos to give you an idea of how it all unfolded…
It goes without saying…
A BIG THANK you to the following peeps and organisations who helped make this performance happen:
- The amazing Robin Whittaker (co-curator of Sound Kitchen 2023), who did a stellar job grabbing audiovisual streams and spatialising the performance in Divadlo Inspirace using immersive spatial audio hardware and software system TiMax
- The awesome Peter Rice (co-curating with Robin) and the rest of the equally awesome Sound Kitchen team
- Our gear sponsors: Bitwig Studio, Audio-Technica, RØDE Microphones, PreSonus and NETGEAR
FLO 
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