After our performance collaboration with the Ethernet Orchestra at Sound Kitchen in 2022 in Calgary, Canada, we thought it would be fun to do another performance at the Web Audio Conference in 2024, taking place at Purdue University in West Lafayette, US.
As we are pretty flexible in terms of instrumentation in FLO, and this conference was focusing on all things Web Audio related, we thought it would be cool for FLO to use an online Web Audio instrument Playsound.space, created by FLO member Ariane Stolfi that uses samples from Freesound.org. We asked Ariane to run a workshop and teach us how to use this instrument with our respective setups. Following the workshop, Nela and Sonia recorded a series of soundscapes locally in Zadar and Melbourne, Maria recorded short audio snippets of piano and trumpet improvisations, and Magda recorded the cello. We then uploaded these audio files to Freesound.org and asked our lovely colleague Frederic Font (lead researcher on the Freesound project) to do a quick moderation of the uploaded sounds, as without this being complete, the sounds could not be accessed through Playsound.space interface.
It is important to note that when you use an instrument like Playsound.space in a web browser, you also have to use a tool for internal audio routing to send the audio from this instrument to SonoBus (if you want to collaborate online with folks around the world). As we already had some licences for Loopback (courtesy of BCSWomen), we used those alongside Blackhole (which works on a $10 donation basis, so it’s pretty affordable).
So, it was all going well, until … erm … it wasn’t! As much as we tried various things (over many testing sessions), we simply could not connect to our Ethernet Orchestra colleagues based in Sydney 😦 Yep, this sometimes happens in NMP (Networked Music Performance), and there is nothing one can do about it apart from coming up with ‘Plan B’. And so we had to say goodbye to Roger Mills, Yavuz Uydu and Paulo Hartman (and all the wonderful music they would have made for this performance) and go, well … ‘solo’.
We set the date for testing the setup with Playsound.space, Loopback and SonoBus. It all seemed ok during tech (on that particular day!), so, we connected and started sending individual audio streams from Zadar, Palermo, Warsaw, Melbourne and Porto Seguro to Valencia, where they were assembled and mixed by Roser before the output was sent to Touch Designer and from there onwards via OBS to FLO YouTube channel. Roser programmed the Touch Designer to react in real-time and abstractly represent different sonic textures extracted from the stereo audio mix she did in SonoBus.
Just in case it all went belly up during the tech rehearsal on the day of the performance at Purdue University, we decided to record two performances and have that as a backup (that we can stream on the FLO YouTube channel should be need to do so). After we did the rehearsal, we felt pretty confident the internet would ‘hold up’ for another week, and we could do the performance live.
However, a few days before the performance, we realised we were still having some pretty peculiar issues with the SonoBus platform that we were not able to resolve. So we did a vote on which recorded performance to stream, and Roser created a private link on FLO YouTube channel to give to WAC2024 organisers.
As a result, on the day of the performance, the audience at Purdue University could still experience the subtle interplay between globally distributed performers using an online Web Audio instrument Playsound.space, through projected visualisation and stereo sound (even though we created the performance a week before). The field of Networked Music Performance is as exciting as it is challenging, so it is super important to have different options for executing the performance, if technology decides to ‘rear its ugly head’ 🙂
Here are some photos to give you a picture of how it all unfolded …
When the internet doesn’t play nice, we all get wrinkles! For everyone wanting to do Networked Music Performance regularly, our tip is – stock up on ‘anti-wrinkle’ goodies! Of course, it all ‘irons out’ naturally after a good rehearsal 🙂
Hmmm … perhaps we can make a FLO compilation album with all the unused compositions one day?
A BIG THANK you to the following peeps and organisations who helped make this performance happen:
- The lovely Frederic Font, who kindly moderated the sounds we uploaded to Freesound.org specifically for WAC 2024 performance (and he did it in record time!)
- Web Audio Conference 2024 organisers.
- BCSWomen who sponsored the Loopback licences for FLO during the pandemic (which came in really handy for this particular performance!)
- Our gear sponsors: Bitwig Studio, Audio-Technica, RØDE Microphones, PreSonus and NETGEAR
FLO 
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