0:57
there's sound going this way, and this way, and
sound going this way and this way as well.
And then there's also visual communication that's happening between everybody.
I'm not going to draw all the arrows here.
But, you can see things going back
and forth, visually between each musician as well.
and so.
as we look at these connections, they're,
they're essentially, forming a network with each other.
with these, these, these, are all in these visual connections linking them together.
but when we're talking about networked music as a, as a kind of field.
we're a little bit more specific.
we're talking about, a musical experience in which the, the way the musicians are
connected to, together becomes integral to a, a musical work or a musical experience.
so we start, moving beyond just those traditional, oral and,
and visual connections of, of a bunch of musicians sitting
in the same room together.
And we start thinking about, different ways to
either extend or replace, or transform those connections.
for instance, if two musicians are, playing with
each other but they're, they are located in
different cities, and they are connected over some
kind of internet connection, their relationship is going to change.
They may still be seeing a video of each other, and they may still be,
hearing each other, but there are certain things
that a network does, like delaying the sound,
ever so slightly, with some latency.
It's going to, to radically change how they are able to play together.
so network music is about all these different, situations in which.
We're consciously transforming these connections amongst
musicians and transforming their experience in making music together.
So in terms of why we would want to do
this, the most common reason is really a practical one.
That we want to make music with people
but we're separated either geographically, you know I'm in
Atlanta and I want to Jam with someone
who's in New York, or, were displaced over time.
I want to compose a piece of music with some friends of mine, and all do
it together, but we can't all sit in a room for a weekend, and do this together.
So I'm going to write a little part and then send it on to someone
else who's going to write a little part, and, and then on and on and on.
and we're going to kind of work over time in that way.
3:06
another reason people might want to do network music
is that they want to preserve an anonymous identity.
They want to collaborate with other musicians but for whatever reason, they
don't want those musicians to know who they are so, behind the network.
there, there are ways, obviously, to, to
protect your identity and, and to remain anonymous.
and another reason perhaps
a little bit more esoteric but, but,
but potentially very interesting, is, an interest
in, creating musical structure that actually, is
derived somehow from the structure of the network.
Where there is that latency that happens when people
are communicating, across the internet at a distance, or.
particular ways that different, musicians, in the network are,
are connected to each other, or disconnected from each other.
Or, or, or the data they're sending is being, mediated somehow.
Somehow, that, that musical structure, is, is inspired somehow.
or, or based on or built from, the structure
of the network that is connecting the musicians, together.
4:04
so now I want to go and, and talk about these
three areas I mentioned at the beginning of the video.
i, in a little bit more detail. The first one, shared sonic environments.
I really like this term, it was coined about
ten ten years ago or so by Alvaro Barbosa.
And The idea of it it's that there's some kind of public online real-time
musical collaboration environment. It's focused on improvisation.
It's focused on people making music together in the moment.
They may not know who each other are.
They may.
They may have met before, they may not have.
They may have come together by plan or completely randomly.
But it's like a giant jam session on the internet where people
are coming together and making this music and improvising.
Trying to make something cooler as they're collaborating together, simultaneously.
It's open, , usually to anyone to join, and participate.
And, and not only can anyone join, but
it's often a kind of irrespective musical experience.
Because these shared sonic environments are often coupled.
With some unusual kind of musical interface.
Or, or, or way of making music.
So that, just about anyone can contribute something musically.
Even if they don't play a traditional instrument.
So, one of the classic examples of a shared sonic environment
was this piece, that Max Neuhaus, an American sound artist did.
back in 1977 called Pub Radio Net.
and this was done for the National Public Radio system in the United States.
It was done on a Sunday afternoon as a two-hour live radio broadcast.
And about 25,000
people across the country telephoned in to a
series of call in numbers they were given.
and they were asked to whistle.
So they.
Telephoned in and then whistled into the phone and then Max built a, a bunch
of analog equipment that, it took the, these
whistling sounds and processed them in real time.
So some of it was the mixing
each different color at a different volume level.
based on some analysis of the frequency of the whistling and and in some of it was
creating a delay line, like the Delay plugin that
we looked at back in module two in Reaper.
But this was a very unusual delay line, because he
actually created it with these white lines here, that we see
6:18
On this diagram these white lines represent a telephone connection, they
connected to different mpr stations across the country to each other.
so what
max did was he, he connected these in a loop and so
that he would send these whistling sound out over this telephone loop.
They would come back after a certain delay time and, and,
and the process of them go cross all these telephone connections.
They moved, they moved, lose some amplitude in the process as well.
And so they then he, as soon as they came
back to the source that they could send out again.
So, it would feedback over and over again, just like a, a feedback delay live.
and each time it went through it would also get go through a frequency
shifter that would shift the frequency of
these listening sounds down and down and down.
So, as these things.
We're, we're, we're going through this feedback delay.
They were repeating over and over and over again.
They were going down and down and down in pitch and they we're gradually dying out.
and so I want to give you a sense of this the sonic result of all of this.
8:19
that happen when people are kind of jamming
together over distance over a network that make
take five or 10 or 20 even more
milliseconds for the sound I'm creating to reach you.
And that might not sound like a lot, but, you know, as we
get into 20 or 50 or 100 milliseconds, it's going to get very
hard for us to play in time sync with each other.
Because everything I hear from you is going
to be late and everything you hear from
me is going to be late, and so
Ninjam takes an unusual approach to addressing the situation.
But rather than trying to reduce the latency
as much as possible, it actually increases the latency.
And it does that so that everyone will always play in
perfect time sync with each other, but they're off by one measure.
So when I send
my audio to you.
Ninjam just kind of holds on to it, until it gets the beginning of the next measure.
And then it sort of is pointed at the next measure.
So our beats are always in perfect sync.
Those aligned to the timing perfectly, but we're always
hearing things exactly one measure of from each other.
So this solves the problem of playing in time sync perfectly.
It introduces a whole bunch of other interesting problems about playing.
in terms of you know melodic and harmonic progression in particular since
we're all since everyone's off by a measure of, of everyone else.
But again those are, those are they're, they're interesting
things that we look at maybe not as limitations
in the field of network music but as opportunities
to shape the musical experience in music that we're creating.
so the interface here is very simple it
basically see All of your local audio channels
here that you want to put in, and these might be coming from tracks in Reaper,
they might be coming through a microphone input or, or
you're plugging in your guitar or whatever it might be.
And over here you can see that the remote channels, these are all the
channels you're hearing that are coming from,
from users that are elsewhere on the Internet.
up here there's a metronome, so you can set the meter
and you can set the the beats per minute and that's
shared amongst everyone and down here is a Text Chat window
so you can try to coordinate with other people what you're doing.
So you can try
to kind of plan musically whats going on through that text chat.
10:24
So I want to move on now to collaborative composition systems.
These are they're very different from these shared sonic environments.
The notion behind these is that.
There's a collaboration that's unfolding out of real time.
so people are not all working simultaneously making music.
But this might happen over hours, or days, or weeks, or, or years even.
and the, the it's focused on, on creating a composition together.
On some music that's going to result some,
some, some final product, rather than just on
I'm kind of improvising again in the moment.
and it may be geared towards novices, it may
be a private community or may be a public one.
It just kind of varies from system to system.
but I wanted to talk about a couple
of examples very quickly of these collaborative composition systems.
The first one.
Is a project of mine this is a piece of that
I worked on a few years ago called Piano Etudes and
there's a bunch of different musical fragments in, in
these etudes that are represented by these little boxes.
11:21
And the piece can be played basically any way that you want, right, starting on
some max, and then going to another one
that's connected by another one, and another one.
It's kind of following these connections, amongst others,
to create your own path through the piece.
So what I did was, I created a website where anyone Once you can
go and kind of choose your own adventure if
you will and build your own version of the piece.
So you can
[SOUND]
click on these and preview what they sound like, and if you like it, you can add it.
And from there I can see these green ones are the places I can go
next, and maybe I'll repeat that twice, and from there I can go up there.
and so I'm starting to build this piece here
and I can play what I have on this timeline.
[MUSIC]
And I could
build a whole version of this piece in my last several minutes this way.
And once I have that, I can share it with other people online.
I can enable them to go in and modify or
extend what I've done to create a, a derivative work online.
and then I can also print out a musical score a pianist can then take,
it's a representation of what I've done, a musical notation
a pianist can take it and perform on a console.
and so what we've done with this is, invited
people to to create their own versions of the pieces.
and then looked over the contributions and pianists are going to perform this.
They're actually selected versions that they particularly
like, and presented those in live performance.
There's a collaboration that's happening here between me creating these
fragments, and these kind of structure on this web site.
All the different people that are coming.
and creating their own versions and then sharing them.
Other people that might be creating derivative versions from what
they created and the pianists they're looking at that the versions
that have been created picking some of them and adding their
own musical interpretation and exclusivity to them as they perform them.
Another example of a collaborative composition environment
is one we talked about already way back in module two called ccmixter.org.
And when we looked at
ccMixter, we were originally looking at it primarily as a source
of creative commons licensed audio content,
but ccMixter's much more than that.
It's really a community.
Of musician's, and when you upload music to ccMixter, you're
strongly encouraged not just to upload the final MP3 mixdown of
that piece that you've made, but to upload all the
tracks individually, all the individual sounds you've used to create it.
All the source
content basically, so that someone can then come in and.
and take, not just your whole song and, and build a remix of
it, but take individual elements of it
down to individual sounds and individual tracks.
and maybe take elements from other people's songs in
the community and recombine those into a new composition.
And ccmixter enables people to trace these kind of derivations and see how
something get's used somewhere else, and somewhere
else, and somewhere else and somewhere else.
so this entire community has developed a round.
this idea of sharing content, and, and constantly
grabbing other people's material and remixing it this way.
14:25
So the final thing I'm going to talk about as an
example of networked music in networked performance are laptop orchestras.
and these have become incredibly popular,
especially on college campuses in recent years.
and a laptop orchestra, if you don't know what
it is, is pretty much exactly what you think.
It's a, bunch of people.
Performing on laptops in a kind of orchestral configuration.
So there might be five people in the laptop orchestra.
There might be 50.
There might be 100, and each laptop might be running the same software in
a given piece, or each laptop musician might be taking on a different role.
There might be a kind of orchestration
that happens here similar to a traditional orchestra.
every piece for laptop orchestras is, kind of, unique, building off of
this basic idea that I got a bunch of people playing on laptops.
what am I going to do with that.
but a number of things that people do, end up involving, network
connections amongst the musicians, in, in, very, important, a, a and critical ways.
So within a laptop orchestra there's the obviously the traditional oral
and visual connections amongst the
musicians but they're also typically connected
via WiFi and so the WiFi connections
and the data exchanged across that wireless network
might be for a simpler purpose might
be sharing a time synchronization amongst the musicians.
They're playing according to a.
common tempo and meter, in sync.
it might be enabling them to exchange chat messages about
what they're doing, to plan, kind of work through things.
It might
be turning the structure of performances, as if it's a multiplayer game, like, the
musicians are actually competing against each other
in a game-like environment, but as they're.
As they're competing and playing this game, they're
actually, creating the music of the piece as well.
based on the, their activities in the game.
it may be about, them sending each other musical content.
that might be in the form of, of, of audio files.
It might be in the form of MIDI data.
It might be in the form of,
A musical score, or it might even be in the form of
a, of code, if they're doing a, a kind of live coding environment.
They might actually be swapping code fragments with each other.
all this stuff might be happening over
this, this wireless network, as they're performing together,
and, and, and, different pieces in the laptop
orchestra repertoire have explored all of these ideas.
So to review what we've covered in this video
we talk the three different incarnations of network music.
We talked about shared sonic environment, collaborative composition
systems, and laptop orchestras and there's many other things people do with networks
to make music multilocation performance for
instance where, where, two, musicians or ensembles
are, are in different locations at
two different performance venues, and they're, and
they're collaborating over a usually a high-speed
audio and video connection to perform together.
Or network sonification.
we talked about data sonification,
in module five.
What if we actually try to sonify network traffic.
We can monitor the performance of networks and learn
something about their structure, or just to make interesting music.
All these are different areas of inquiry, that are active fields of research.
In in network music.
so in the next video we're going to try to kind
of wrap up the course and talk about some broad themes.
And, and where you might go next as you continue
your own exploration of, of the field of music technology.