FLO is a global, multicultural, multidisciplinary project, and lots of our members work at academic institutions around the world and keep tabs on what’s going on in their own country in terms of conferences and events that overlap with FLO activities. Ariane, for example, works at the Universidade Federal do Sul da Bahia and keeps tabs on things happening in Brazil. This is how we ended up performing at the Conferência Internacional de Pesquisa em Sonoridades – SILÊNCIOS, which was held at the Federal University of Espirito Santo in Vitória 🙂 Since we were on a quest to explore more about using the chord sequences produced as a result of IBM quantum computer calculations, we decided to create a new composition on the theme of Silences, and yes, being fans of John Cage and his book Silence: Lectures and Writings definitely had a lot to do with that! If you are not familiar with his writing and compositions, feel free to explore further here: https://www.johncage.org.
So, the initial idea was for Ariane to attend the conference in person; however, her circumstances changed, and we decided to put forward a proposal for a telematic audio-visual performance instead. As it happened, the first day of the conference was already planned as being entirely online (to enable remote presentations by participants who could not attend in person), and so it all worked perfectly! To keep things simple for the organisers, we decided to record the performance in advance and stream it on the FLO YouTube channel on the day of the conference. So, all the ‘online participants’ joined a Zoom session set up by the conference organisers in Vitória (Brazil). When it was time for FLO to present work, Silvia started streaming the performance to the FLO YouTube channel from Valencia (Spain), so we all watched and listened to it via this Zoom session. And then something really strange occurred… the sound seemed to be ‘in time’ but the visuals were somewhat lagging behind. Which, if you think about it, makes sense as the approximate distance between Vitória and Valencia is more than 7000 kilometres!!!!! And so, we learnt that the best thing to do with a pre-recorded telematic performance is to send the audiovisual file via WeTransfer to the event organisers in advance so they can play it locally from their computer 🙂
To watch the performance (as intended!) without any of these ‘cross-Atlantic’ delays, head over to FLO YouTube channel 🙂
Below are some of the photos captured during the process of making Telematic City Jam -Vitória …
- We received a notification about our proposal being accepted, which was super exciting! And the fact that it came in the form of a lovely acceptance letter (rather than being automatically generated by a conference registration portal) with the option of attending in-person or participating remotely was even more exciting! And let’s be real for a minute here … flying folks from Melbourne, Valencia, Warsaw, Palermo, Zadar and Porto Seguro to Vitória is not only very lengthy (in terms of airport transfers, airport check-in cues and flying times) but can also be very expensive if it involves 7000km of distance not to mention the resulting CO2 emmisions further damaging the environment (on a global scale). So a BIG THANK YOU to all the folks who worked on various inventions to make the work with do with FLO possible (Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn (TCP/IP), Tim Berners-Lee (WWW, HTTP, HTML, URL), etc.). You can read more about the invention of the internet in a nice BBC Science Focus (online) magazine article https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/who-really-invented-the-internet. Fascinating stuff indeed!
2. Maria sent a Bitwig session with CubeHarmonic sequences to Nela (so she can free up her hands to play piano, trumpet, flute, percussion, etc.
3) Nela then created a structure for a 3-part performance improvisation (with the chord sequences appearing at the beginning of each section) and shared that with the rest of the team as a screenshot (explaining soundscapes capture in Zadar that would be played as part of each of the sections so everyone knows what sorts of frequencies to anticipate.
Yes, we do telematic performance improvisation, BUT we also ALWAYS have a structure of how this would work. We discuss who will play what (and this could range from a soundwalk and environmental loops, to acoustic instruments, synthesis, WEB Audio and live coding, so every type of music making is included 🙂 Sometimes we need to write the notes/ chords, and sometimes we make a graphic score, it all depends on the occasion. Anyhoo, moving along to …
4) To give us a better idea of how chord sequences were produced using IBM quantum computing, Maria (the expert!) did a session explaining it all. We nodded our heads … some of it ‘went in’, lots of it ‘went out’, but as they say, practice makes perfect!
5) Finally, after we discussed the music component in great detail, it was time to discuss visuals, and this is the area where Silvia is a total expert 🙂
6) After it was all over (the performance and the conference), we received this super nice ‘certificate for participating in the conference’, from the lovely CIPS IV organisers 🙂 Awwww! We HEART CIPS! #conferenceorganisationgoals
A BIG THANK you to the following peeps and organisations who helped make this performance happen:
- The lovely Pedro Silva Marra and the rest of the CIPS IV team for kindly accepting our proposal for the conference performance track and inviting us to submit an article for the conference book 🙂
- Our gear sponsors: Bitwig Studio, Audio-Technica, RØDE Microphones, PreSonus, NETGEAR and WAVES and Rogue Amoeba.
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