After our performance at WAC2024, during which we all used the Playsound.space Web Audio platform (developed by Ariane), we decided it would be prudent to test this kind of setup again, so we wrote a proposal to the IEEE International Symposium on the Internet of Sounds (IS2 2024) for another performance. When the proposal got accepted, the organisers put us in touch with Anna Leschanowsky from the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Germany, who kindly offered to sponsor our participation at the conference. Woohoo!!!
So, once all of that was sorted out, we had a meeting to discuss the performance, and each of us recorded sound files that would be used as part of our individual ‘set’. We then uploaded the sounds to Freesound.org and asked the lovely Frederic Font to ‘moderate’ the sounds so we can use them in our rehearsals and the final performance.
Maria had plenty of instruments to record as per usual 🙂
We were hoping the connection issues with Australia would be resolved; however, no luck there! So our workaround for this performance was for Nela to play both her own set of soundscapes as well as Sonia’s, which was pretty straightforward to do using Playsound.space.
As you may know (from reading the FLO at WAC 2024 blog post or from using Freesound.org), once you upload your sounds to Freesound.org they get a number assigned to them. And, if you want to ‘build a set’ in Playsound.space (that you can use at different occasions), you can create a string of numbers corresponding to those sounds and just save them in a Word doc (or any other text document). Then at the next performance, you just open your laptop, get onto Chrome, type in https://playspund.space/ and copy/paste all the numbers from the text document and voilà! Your whole session magically builds in the browser! Yep. It’s that easy, thanks to Ariane’s ingenious design 🙂
So, this is how Nela’s session for IS2 2024 looked (with soundscapes from Croatia and Australia):
If you want to load up this session to your own computer and have a bit of fun mixing it, you can do so by copying the line below straight into your browser (Chrome works best!):
We dedicated this performance to the late Annette Rose Wilkie, Sonia’s beloved nana, who was a big fan of FLO 🙂
During the performance, the musical improvisation utilising Playsound.space was streamed from London (by Nela), Palermo (by Maria), Warsaw (by Magda) and Porto Seguro (by Ariane) to Valencia, where Silvia mixed the individual streams using SonoBus platform before outputting the audio to Touch Designer programmed to generate interactive visuals in real-time.
The visuals Silvia created for this performance were very simply stunning!!!
The resulting audio-visual blend of globally distributed music was then streamed live using OBS to the FLO YouTube channel and projected in stereo format at the International Audio Laboratories Erlangen concert space, where IS2 2024 took place.
At the end of the concert, we all joined on Zoom to explain the workflow and the tools we used so that the folks attending the conference could learn more about how the Web Audio API works in the context of Networked Music Performance. This was an academic conference after all, and sharing knowledge is a big part of what we do in FLO 🙂
A BIG THANK you to the following peeps and organisations who helped make this performance happen:
- Our performance sponsors: AES Germany
- Our gear sponsors: Bitwig Studio, Audio-Technica, RØDE Microphones, PreSonus, NETGEAR and BCSWomen
P.S.
A few weeks later, an article Nela wrote reflecting on the past decade of being a creative director of FLO, titled ‘Why generosity and humility are crucial in telematic music collaboration’ was published by the online magazine ‘Perfect Sound Forever’ alongside 16 other thought-provoking articles written by other amazing musicians, composers and performers. If you want to know what musical collaboration is really all about (from different perspectives), continue reading here.
A BIG THANK YOU to Jonas Vongsen (for inviting Nela to contribute some thoughts on collaborative music making) and FLO member Anna Xambó for connecting Nela and Jonas together!
FLO 