It’s official. We LOVE Web Audio Conference!!!
We did our first performance at WAC in 2024, and streamed the whole thing to Purdue University in West Lafayette (US), where the conference took place. Not quite meeting the ‘zero carbon emission’ standards (as we still used computers, internet, electricity, servers, etc.), but at least ‘zero’ in terms of travel ( if you want to know how that went, you can watch the recording of the performance on the FLO YouTube channel and read the blog post about the tech prep here). As per usual, after the performance, we all came online to explain the technology workflow to conference attendees, so they could better understand what actually happened, and have an opportunity to ask questions.
Sadly, due to this being a fully remote performance, we missed out on all the coffee breaks, lunch breaks, dinners, (other) concerts, and generally hanging out with all the wonderful WAC community folk, which is what makes attending an academic conference in person such a rewarding experience. Luckily, the WAC2025 conference was held at IRCAM in Paris (much easier for the Europe-based FLO folk to get to), so this time we didn’t miss anything 🙂
So … we have been experimenting with the web audio platform Playsound.space (Ariane developed as part of her PhD) for a while, and since Ariane started working with Reverbera! project and developing her new platform RessoaSom (also built as a web audio application), it made sense to give that a spin in a co-located/distributed performance style we love so much. So we wrote the proposal for FLO + Reverbera!: Telematic City Jam – Paris, and when it got accepted, we started exploring who could be there in person and who could join remotely.
As we recently started experiencing issues connecting to Australia, the plan was for Sonia to start the composition with a Melbourne soundwalk using the LocusCast mobile streaming app, developed by the same folks from the Aix-en-Provence School of Art that created the Locustream Soundmap, which we used during the Covid-19 pandemic to stream the performance from Zadar, Palermo and Warsaw to Reveil – SC8 Off Grid, organised by Soundcamp (more on that here).
The next thing we needed to do was to find a workaround for Nela, who was travelling a lot between the UK and Croatia and only had a mobile Wi-Fi router with her, which provided enough speed for Zoom but not for the (very picky) SonoBus. Mwaaaahhh!!!
Magda and Maria were supposed to be joined by Léa Ikkache (who was busy with her start-up recently and could not play with us) and Alayna Hughes (musician, engineer, producer and creative technologist that Nela met when they were both participating in a panel talk at the Atenea conference in Valencia a few years back, and, who finally had a bit of time to join 🙂 Unfortunately, Léa was in the middle of moving to another city, and her internet access was kind of in flux, so she decided to join us at the next one.
In our correspondence with the WAC2025 organisers, we worked out that we only had time to do a quick set-up and sound check on the day of the performance (as all the other performances and conference sessions were taking place in the same venue at IRCAM), so we sent the organisers a detailed stage plan with some additional questions for IRCAM technicians.
During FLO rehearsals, we discussed Plan A, in which Magda would use one computer to play Nela’s soundscape composition and grab the soundwalk stream sent by Sonia from Melbourne, and stream her processed cello from the other. Maria and Alayna would join the SonoBus from Palermo and Valencia, and Nela, Ariane and Silvia would join from IRCAM.
Plan A was the ideal scenario. Just to be prudent, we also discussed Plan B, in which Nela would play the tracks from Sonia, Alayna, Magda and Maria (that we recorded during our rehearsal sessions), just in case the network goes to the ‘not-work’ mode. Needless to say, sometimes it pays off to be prudent! To cut a long story short, we tested everything the day before the performance. Yes, we did it at IRCAM, and yes, we used their network, and yes, it all worked perfectly! And here’s the proof 🙂
And then, at 18.30, when we started setting up for tech, nobody could connect to SonoBus, not the FLO folks in the performance space, not the remote FLO performers and not even the IRCAM tech team! The network was fine, but the messages we were all getting pointed out to the SonoBus server being ‘down’! Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa??????
After a brief moment of shock, everyone started overflowing the WhatsApp group chat with ideas of what to do, other platforms to jump on, etc. However, we couldn’t do anything about any of the ingenious ideas that FLO troops came up with, because the concert was starting at 20.30 and more folks needed to go through the tech, so there was no time left for us to troubleshoot the server issues. The lesson? When it comes to NMP, always have a Plan B!!! (sounds like a nice T-Shirt slogan, doesn’t it?)
So whilst other performers were doing the tech, Nela was busy backstage rearranging her setup to incorporate all the tracks. Luckily, Sonia did a test of the soundwalk in advance and uploaded it to freesound.org, so Nela could play it using Playsound.space and throw everything else into Bitwig alongside soundscapes she recorded around Paris. And so the 25th FLO performance went on without a (technical) glitch. Phew! Sure, the mix did not sound like a real-time interplay between all of the players (because that was impossible to achieve under the circumstances), but everyone’s contributions were still in there, and that’s all that matters!
For Nela and Magda, the whole story with Web Audio started way back in 2014, when they were part of the G.Hack project at QMUL. Together with two other G.Hackers: Katerina Kosta (ex Jukedeck and ByteDance and now Head of AI at Hook) and Patrizia Carlota (performance artist and sound healer), they decided it would be super fun to teach women how to use this new thing called ‘Web Audio’ and create a web-based sonic map of Fira Montjuïc in Barcelona, where Sónar by Day was taking place (G.Hack website is currently transitioning from one server to another, but you can read more about the Learn to Hack Web Audio API with G.Hack workshop we did at Sónar festival on WISE@QMUL website).
So, at the time, we were all pretty naive about the speed of web audio development. We used some code published by Chrome folks, and when we came to Sónar festival, we met a developer from Chrome, who had one look at our code and said, “ah yeah, this code will not be working next week”. Whaaaaaaa??? A brief moment of panic ensued, but nevertheless, the workshop went fine. And so, we decided to do another workshop during Music Tech Fest 2014, which took place at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) and teach participants how to create a web-based sonic map of Centre Pompidou (amending the code, of course).
A day before the workshop, Nela gave a talk about the G.Hack project (as she was the Chair) and introduced FLO (which was just starting). On the day of the workshop, Nela saw a huge poster with all the workshop info on the office door of one of the IRCAM faculty members. She knocked, out of interest, as she was curious to see how this poster ended up there. Frederic Bevilacqua (… yep …small world!) opened the door, as that was his office, and told Nela all about his daughter, who was interested in science and robotics and how he loved that we were pioneering women in STEM with our project! Wow! Just wow! But then again, we are talking about Fred, who is a very special person indeed!
Even though FLO exchanged emails with Frederic before the WAC2025 conference, Nela didn’t put two and two together until the first day of the conference, when she saw him and realised that he was the same Frederic from IRCAM who put the G.Hack poster on his door back in 2014. And then of course she had to tell him all about it to check if he even remembered, as IRCAM does soooo many events and 11 years is a very long time! But of course, he remembered … as he is Frederic… and he is awesome… and now we have his telephone number … and he is our BFF 🙂
Ok, back to the conference …
The presentations, talks and concerts on the first 2 days were top-notch! On the last day, some of the researchers did workshops and demos of their projects, which is the best way to look under the hood, ask about the code and (most importantly) find out when their project will be made available to the public (so we can use it in the next performance, as that’s been our thing for the past 11 years!).
In the afternoon, Suzanne Saint-Cast (from the WAC2025 committee) moderated an interesting roundtable discussion on diversity in the Web Audio community. Nela and Ariane participated in person, whilst Silvia recorded a video message as she had to fly off earlier that day. The other participants included: Panagiota Anastasopoulou (also known as Penny), who is currently doing her PhD at the Music Technology Group (MTG) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and hangs out with the freesound folks (including the lovely Frédéric Font) and who was able to moderate the soundscape Sonia recorded in Melbourne and uploaded to freesound.org, so Nela was able to use it with playsound.space during the performance (THANK YOU PENNY!).
We also had Joana Chicau, a lecturer and a PhD candidate at the Creative Institute at the University of the Arts London, who did a very interesting keynote, “What Moves You? Hacking the Web with Counter-Choreography”; Bruna Guarnieri Colasso, who did an awesome performance with Gabriel Vigliensoni using the software plantasia.space that everyone fell in love with instantly, and wanted to beta-test ( FYI, if you follow the link above you might be able to do it too!); Jessica A. Rodriguez, who is based at McMaster University in Canada, and did an amazing live coding performance ‘afrontaciones => (f.) copings — Narrativas de la Memoria y la Violencia del Habitar’ and also won one of the Best Practitioner Talk Awards and Rochelle Tham, graduate student at Stanford University’s CCRMA Master program who did a talk and a demo of the Glitch Garden, an interactive audio web application for technical ear training – cool or what?
Also on the panel, we had Anna Xambó Sedó, an active member of FLO a few years back (she did a performance with us during Covid-19 pandemic, we miss her a lot, and hope to play with her again real soon!). Btw, Anna did a super live performance titled ‘Sensing the Alice Holt Forest’ and also demoed her research project just before the panel.
Last but not least, we had Zeynep Özcan, who is the faculty director of the Girls in Music and Technology (GiMaT) project and did a live coding performance, ‘Following Currents with Inviso to the Seine’ and Professor Elaine Chew, who did a keynote at one of the FLOSSIE conferences Nela coordinated at QMUL back in 2012 (again, small world!), joining the panel over Zoom.
The number of women working in the field of audio, music and computing is not very big (as we keep bumping into each other at various events and what not) but, it is safe to say that whether being involved as researchers, artists of both, they are all doing super cools stuff, and, also tend to be actively promoting female participation in STEM through various projects, organisations and events (on the side!). In other words, these are some very busy ladies indeed!
And … on the note of awesome female artists/ technologists … we would like to use this opportunity to point all the ‘newbies’ in the equality, diversity and inclusion space, to read the paper Anna Xambó Sedó wrote in 2018: Who Are the Women Authors in NIME?-Improving Gender Balance in NIME Research and various other papers and thesis published on the topic.
Why??? So that you can be prepared to answer questions like: “how can we solve the diversity issue in music and computing” with a 3-pronged answer that gently nudges the person asking to: a) educate themselves on the subject (from historic and current perspective); b) hire diverse talent and c) advise new hires on the strategies for moving up through the ranks, so that the next generation can have role models and see themself following in their footsteps!
If everyone reading this blog could do that, perhaps, in 10 years’ time we won’t have the need to organise a ‘diversity panel’ at WAC or any other conference. Instead, all our panels would organically be diverse 🙂
And for those folks who have managed to read this far, we just wanted to mention that even though we wrote a lot about the women at WAC and … erm … Frederic (who is very dear to our hearts), we also met a lot of male colleagues, some of which we are hoping to continue the conversation with, like: José Manuel Gil Panal, who is working on a super project called Hi-Audio at Télécom Paris (and who also won the Best Poster Award for his paper A Maximum Length Sequence–based method for robust round-trip latency estimation in online Digital Audio Workstations), and Jean-Brice Godet, an IRCAM alumni and an awesome musician, who did a super interesting performance (just after FLO), called MurMures using Web Audio and live clarinet spatialised into bluetooth speakers 🙂
Nela’s favourite live coding teacher, Thor Magnusson, was also there (woohoo!). He did a conference keynote titled ‘Thinking with Technology: Hacking, Making and Improvisation’, and, for those who are not in the live coding community (yet), Thor was involved with the development of ixi-lang and a whole bunch of other fun toys you can download here and use for free 🙂 He has been based at the University of Sussex for a while, and recently started the Intelligent Instruments Lab at the University of Iceland (where he is from), where they are designing “instruments embedded with creative AI for musical performance”. Awesome or what??? So, for anyone looking to do a PhD or a postdoc, this is the place to do it! And just look at the team! Yep! Nuff said!!!
You can check the totally amazing collection of WAC2025 research papers on Zenodo (yep, free access and free download, as it should be!). The paper ‘RessoaSom: Concrete reuse of sounds from the archive of Reverbera! project‘, that Ariane presented as a research poster (and got the Best Poster Award for woohoo!!!), is also there. And just in case we didn’t make this clear, the Reverbera! project was the whole raison d’être for this particular FLO performance, as Ariane used the RessoaSom platform to perform, and Silvia constructed the visuals using the library of 200 videos filmed as part of the project! Nice!
Ariane will be hosting WAC2027 at the Universidade Federal do Sul da Bahia in Brazil (where she works), and we hope to see you all there in the spring of 2027! Bring flip-flops, sunglasses and SPF50! Yep, life is a beach for some lucky folks!!!
And … just so you don’t think FLO is all work and no play, here are some “on-duty/off-duty” photos 🙂
A BIG THANK YOU to the following peeps and organisations who helped make this performance happen:
- The amazing Frederic Bevilacqua, who kindly wrote invitation letters, gave us ideas about what art exhibitions to see in Paris, helped us with the set-up and everything else we needed (including finding a doctor near IRCAM at 9pm at night!). What a star! We miss him already!
- The technical team (coordinated by Benjamin Matuszewski), who did their best to help us go from plan A to plan B when the unexpected technical issues with the SonoBus servers appeared out of the blue
- The lovely Suzanne Saint-Cast, who led the Diversity Panel on the last day of the conference
- Our gear sponsors: Bitwig Studio, Audio-Technica, RØDE Microphones, PreSonus, NETGEAR, WAVES, BCSWomen, and Rogue Amoeba.
FLO 