We love the Radiophrenia project! It’s a radio art collective, a festival and an art radio station (broadcasting intermittently across Glasgow on 87.9FM once per year), all rolled into one! Whenever we have something to contribute to their yearly festival broadcast, we send it in! Sometimes it fits with the theme of the festival, sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s ok!
In 2016, we sent the Radiophrenia team a recording of In Transglasphōnē performance we did at CMMR2016, which took place at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. In this performance, Nela, Magdalena and Ximena sent streams from the QMUL music studio in London, whilst Maria (Papadomanolaki) went on a soundwalk with her mobile phone. We grabbed Maria’s mobile stream and used JACK Audio Connection Kit (or JACK) to send 8 channels to the University of São Paulo, where our colleagues Mathieu Barthet and Thomas Deacon (who attended the conference in person) did the spatialisation in 8 channels 🙂 We didn’t have any issues with streaming because: 1) we did a performance between two universities; 2) we had access to high-speed university networks, and 3) we knew the university IT team and were able to request specific ports to be opened so streams could be sent and received without any issues. These are some very specific conditions which are not available to folks outside of academia, which is why, over the years, we tried many different Networked Music Performance platforms.
In 2023, we sent the Radiophrenia team 4 tracks from the Ghost Structures album (Once upon a time, Unavailable at the moment, Building a connection, and Women are from Mars), which we did in collaboration with Camille Lacroix for Tsuku Boshi Records in 2022. We recorded the album using the SonoBus platform. Nela connected from London, Magda from Warsaw, Ada from Oslo, Maria from Palermo, Sonia from Melbourne and Ariane from Arraial d’Ajuda. In other words, we were quite spaced out geographically 🙂 The internet was playing nice, and we encountered very few issues. Of course, the album was mixed and mastered from the locally recorded tracks, as streaming from home tends to have its drawbacks, and these drawbacks (i.e. internet dropouts) tend to be …erm … ‘audible’ 🙂
In 2024, we started experimenting with quantum computer music, and thought we would check in with the Radiophrenia team if a performance based on the 4D CubeHarmonic (which utilised the IBM quantum circuit) would fit into the 2025 festival programming. It turned out that it did, so we got down to work figuring this out! We decided to call this performance Telematic City Jam – Glasgow, as it would be broadcast during the Radiophrenia 2025 across Glasgow in Scotland.
The 4D-CubeHarmonic is a digital version of the CubeHarmonic instrument, which is based on Rubik’s Cube. We used CubeHarmonic in a composition called Blues and Greys: For Zadar Soundscapes, CubeHarmonic, Piano, Flute, Theremin, Cymbals, Triangle and Tambourine, that we presented online at the Mathematical and Computational Models in Music workshop during the pandemic. This, initially, ‘physical’ instrument was re-conceptualised by Maria Mannone and coded by her colleague Takashi Yoshino from Toyo University, Japan, as a ‘4D CubeHarmonic’ (that can be accessed from anywhere in the world through a web browser).
Before embarking on the quantum computing journey, Nela jumped on a Zoom call with Maria to learn more about how it all works 🙂
By using an IBM quantum circuit as a ‘chord variation decision-making’ tool, Maria arrived at three different chord sequences that would become an inspiration for the rest of the composition. She then recorded these chord sequences using 4D CubeHarmonic and added a touch of reverb to the recordings using Bitwig.
Following this, we set up a telematic session with the aim of recording ‘Telematic City Jam – Glasgow’ composition by streaming audio from Brazil, Croatia, Poland, Italy, Australia and Spain. As it sometimes happens, the network speed was not entirely on our side (as Sonia, streaming from Melbourne, could not connect to Nela, streaming from Zadar), so we did an initial mix of all the streams that we were able to capture, and forwarded this mix first to Sonia and then to Nela to add their musical contributions ‘off-line’. Nela did some fine-tuning of the mix in Digital Performer to ‘glue’ the composition together by sending all the tracks to an auxiliary bus (with reverb plug-in) and compressing it ever so slightly so it is ready for broadcast 🙂
Besides broadcasting existing work, Radiophrenia also commissions new work every year and invites artists to present their work live at different locations (so keep that in mind if you want to travel to Glasgow for the 2026 edition!)
After ironing out all the technical challenges, ‘Telematic City Jam – Glasgow’ was ready to be broadcast on 87.9 FM as part of the Radiophrenia 2025 festival in April. And, a few months later, it was also broadcast as part of Radiophrenia Shorts 53 on London’s amazing sound art station Resonance FM (which we are a big fan of!) in August. Talking about two birds with one stone, right?
You can hear the composition on FLO SoundCloud (sorry, no visuals this time) as well as in person, if you are planning to travel to Sicily and attend the 3rd International Symposium on Quantum Computing and Musical Creativity (ISQCMC ’25) conference, where Maria will be presenting a paper we wrote about the use of quantum computing in musical composition and playing Telematic City Jam – Glasgow as an example 🙂
A BIG THANK you to the following peeps and organisations who helped make this performance happen:
- Radiophrenia team (Mark Vernon, Timothea Armour and Stevie Jones) for kindly accepting our proposal for the 2025 edition of the festival, and gently reminding us of various submission deadlines.
- Our gear sponsors: Bitwig Studio, Audio-Technica, RØDE Microphones, PreSonus, NETGEAR, WAVES and BCSWomen
FLO 
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