Transcript

Improvising through wires--making telematic music: Jason Robinson at TEDxAmherstCollege

I'd like to begin with a thought experiment imagine this musicians and an audience congregate for a concert but not a traditional concert in which there's an audience there a band on stage and um you know in a traditional venue instead there are multiple audiences and multiple stages distributed across multiple venues by some parent magic all involved are participating simultaneously in the same event distributed across these sites the musicians perform together in real time using specialized audio and video networking technologies that although related to things like Skype and FaceTime far surpass the quality of audio and video inherent in those systems now let's imagine the implications of this recording sessions could take place simultaneously at multiple recording studios musicians could participate in concerts without the cost or environmental impact of air travel or automobile Transportation concerts could take place that involve musicians and audiences in different countries with restrictive travel and Visa policies incarcerated or institutionalized individuals could collaborate with musicians outside of the confines of their limited movements indeed these are just a few of the many possibilities that very quickly come to mind for nearly 15 years I've been in a manner of speaking improvising through wires I've been involved in projects that feature performers at different sites connected by this networking technology these are projects that bring to life our thought thought experiment indeed I'm part of a growing International Community of Music Makers eager to explore the frontiers of what goes by several different names telematic music networked music distributed performance or or just net music I'd like to share with you a recent project um today that relates to this last April I served as the local coordinator for and performed in virtual tour 2013 a 3day event that paired an ensemble of composer improvisers in La Hoya California with three other distant ensembles for the LA HOA musicians it was a tour of sorts but a tour in which they remained in the same place each day while the location of their collaborators changed the ammer location featured myself Hampshire college professor Marty Erick and local percussionist Bob weer performing in Buckley Recital Hall here at amrest college and we were performing together with flutist Nicole Mitchell trombonist Michael deson pianist Myra mford and basist Mark dresser who were at the University of California in San Diego we debuted five compositions written specifically for for the event all of which relied heavily on improvisation an aspect of the project that I'll I'll return to in a while now I'd like to share with you a a short video excerpt from the concert which will illuminate some of the issues I'm about to speak about [Music] I [Music] [Applause] [Music] he [Applause] [Music] so here we are a distributed Ensemble performing in real time together traversing some 3,000 miles between our two locations the Vantage of the video is from the view of the audience in Buckley Recital Hall we see Bob and Marty and and me live and In the Flesh on the stage surrounded by projected images of our our California collaborators and real time almost as if they're physically present on on stage with us um so how exactly did we do this well here's the technical setup and today I'll Focus just on on the audio the audio networking was accomplished using open- Source freeware called jacktrip and Jack trip enables multi-channel full quality uncompressed audio um networking between two or more locations on the internet the story of the creation of Jack trip is is worth retelling here in the year 2000 Stanford University Professor Chris cha and a small team of researchers were awarded an NSF Grant to develop new audio Technologies for the internet this grant establishes this established the soundwire research Group which stands for sound waves on the internet from realtime Echoes housed at Stanford's Center for computer research in music and Acoustics in the project they discovered this really interesting phenomenon they took sounds and and sent them from one location to another location on the internet and then sent those sounds back so that it created an echo between the two locations and this Echo then generated a kind of feedback loop which had a frequency to it and it turns out that the frequency of that feedback loop was determined by the physical distance between the two Network nodes so the further away the two Network nodes the lower the frequency of the feedback the closer the higher the frequency of the feedback and this was due to latency and latency is a kind of time delay inherent in all networked communication the further the distance that a sound had to travel the longer it would take to get there and if you can imagine the sounds going back and forth the longer it takes the slower the oscillation of the pitch and the frequency itself the lower the frequency will be now early in the project they decided to develop uh networking software to enable this sending and networking of the audio this is how Jack trip was created the name of Jack trip is a contraction of the word Jack which is a a name of an audio connection toolkit a kind of software developers toolkit that they used and triple a reference to the three three site synchronous concert that in which they unveiled the software now for our event we use Jack trip to send five channels of uncompressed full quality 48 K audio in both directions 10 channels in total each Channel contained a submix of various instrument and microphone inputs so that all of the all of the musicians and all their sounds of the distributed Ensemble were heard in both locations the audio was then routed to Stage monitors or inar monitors in the case for for amoris so that the local performers could hear and interact with the sounds of the remote performers the audio was also sent to main speakers and mix together with the local performers so that the audiences at both locations would hear a kind of composite ho of the distributed Ensemble almost as if everybody performing was physically present in in both in both locations so now I'd like to pose a seemingly simple question with deeply theoretical implications did the concert sound the same at both locations well for this I offered are two answers no and no first differences in the sound equipment configuration and in sound level choices and differences in the acoustic properties of each space ensure that no two performance baces will sound the same even if the basic audio being inputed into their speaker systems is identical but the second answer to this question the second no is the one that's that has more theoretical implications and this has to do with latency as I mentioned earlier latency is a time delay inherent in all network communication latency is the time it takes for data to Traverse the length of fiber optic cables from one location to another theoretically in a perfect world the speed of this data flow would be the speed of light after all we're using fiber optic cables and they operate using light now in more basic terms what this means is that a sound generated in California would take something like 30 or 40 milliseconds to reach amorist and it turns out that 50 milliseconds acts as a special kind of Threshold at which musical performers feel like they can or cannot play in synchronous time together as if you're in in the same space in other words if there's more than 50 milliseconds of latency most performers feel like they can't actually play in time with each other now the the aggregated total latency of our connection of our audio connection is something a little bit more complicated than simply the speed of light light or Fiber Optic Cables it turns out that the various equipment that helps create and maintain the audio networking increases the latency and here are things like ethernet switches audio interfaces computer processors uh even amplifiers and other sound equipment they all pushed the latency higher so we were likely dealing with slightly more than 50 milliseconds of latency in our project here now put another way what the local audience in amorist for example hears is the sounds the realtime sounds of the local performers being combined with the slight slightly latent sounds of the remote performers we hear the local present and the networked past now uh what this does when we're performing is really quite interesting the the latency impacts the way it feels to to to to perform together and an an anecdote from our project can help explain this so early in the project we were interested in seeing if we could actually play in time together across across the audio network and to experiment with this we decided to try to play jazz standards together in time tunes that require a regular beat between all of those making the music and try to do this across the network so during a performance of body and soul that the classic Jazz tune we discovered that we could indeed play in time together except there were these interesting qualities to the beat the way it felt we simultaneously felt that the beat was being impacted by latency by the sort of latency in the network but yet at the same time it felt like we had certain tools as improvisers in traditional collocated in the same room performance that could help mediate the impact this latency we could indeed play in time together but we each individually had to decide where we were going to place our rhythms in relationship to the recurrent beat there wasn't just one way to play in time together we could each individually decide to place our rhythms slightly ahead of the beat or slightly behind the beat or anywhere in between and when we finished playing we started talking about this phenomenon and we were surprised that we were sort of feeling the same thing and we started to refer to this as a kind of fat beat as an expanded feeling of the beat that was a composite of real time and latent sounds now while this was largely the product of latency we were also keenly aware that we experience these kinds of microtiming issues when we perform together and improvise together in traditional in-person contexts this is what Charles Kyle and Steven Feld in their 19 1994 book called music grooves discovered when they looked at when they examined classic basis drummer Rhythm Section combinations in the recorded history of jazz it turns out that bases and drummers like Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones of the classic 1950s Miles Davis quintet rarely placed their rhythms together this is in normal performance in-person performance they rarely Place their rhythms in the same place in relationship to the beat it turns out that many basist Place their rhythms slightly behind the beat and many drummers Place their Rhythm slightly ahead of the beat and it's these participatory discrepancies in the words of Kyle and Feld that give the music a certain compelling feel and character it's what makes the music Groove now we were experiencing this as a product of the latency in our project but at the same time we were noticing that the tools we had from traditional collocated performance could help us mediate this we had to decide where we going to place our rhythms in relationship to this kind of fattened telematic beat and I believe that it's our experiences as improvisers that prepare us for this kind of situation for mediating this latency so what then is exactly is this activity we call improvisation well for some improvisation is a kind of extemporaneous creation it's creating something in the exact moment of delivery of performance for others it's also something that's devoid of pre-planned structure something that just sort of made up on the spot now for me this second part of the definition doesn't really hold up when measured against the use of improvisation in various Traditions around the world I'm thinking of jazz and rock music but also North Indian classical music Persian classical music and many others in these Traditions context and historical performance practices determine the kinds of decisions that improvisers are likely to make now for me improvisation is wholly contextual it's a form of in the- moment real-time critical thinking decision making that takes place in specific musical contexts it isn't random and you can indeed play the wrong note but landing on the wrong note as my friend AJ heble argues can have profound social and political implications playing dissonantly raises questions now while I'm a saxophonist and a composer and I certainly like to think about the the mechanics of music you know pitches rhythms and forms and things like that I nevertheless increasingly find myself prer referring to think about improvisation in more abstract sociol linguistic ways and from this perspective improvisation can be seen as a kind of interaction or as a form of listening or as a form of co-creation or as social activity or maybe even more fundamentally as a form of knowledge production aimed at making sense of of our embodied and imagined relationships to one another and to the world this is what George lipit Daniel Fishin and AJ heble in their recent book The Fierce urgency of Now call the ethics of co-creation improvisation helps us imagine the kinds of communities and the kinds of relationships to one another that promise a better more engaged future based on full inran listening to One Another interacting with one another and working together so in conclusion I pose two questions first what does it mean to be an improviser dedicated to making interactive music Across the latent Network what does it mean to connect with another human being or groups of human beings through Fiber Optic Cables audio interfaces computer processors internet to and institutionally mediated access to virtuality well I don't really have answers to these open-ended questions but I will say this and here's where I believe the disruptive innovation in telematics truly lies telematics tell us more about our embodied In the Flesh experiences as human beings as for our our need for True connection to one another for empathy in an incessantly globalizing modern world rather than being some kind of projection into a science fiction future of of disembodiment and virtual reality while what I've presented here gives only a brief glimpse into the practices and possibilities of telematics uh um there's much more that can be said the breadth and enormous volume of of aesthetic approaches being being developed right now defy any simple summary nevertheless two conclusions can be drawn from my experiences first telematics tells us more illuminates what it means to be a physically embodied socially situated artist and because of an Express focus on interactivity listening and co-creation I believe that improvisers are uniquely positioned to advance the possibilities offered in telematics thank you [Applause]