So, the last topic that I want to cover,

in this module, as we're looking at these different,

looking at very active fields in, in current

research and practice in music technology is networked music.

and we're going to look, again this is an

extremely broad field, so we're going to focus in

on three particular areas of network music in

this video, we're looking at shared sonic environments.

collaborative composition systems and, laptop orchestras.

But before we do that, I want to ask, what network music actually is.

I want to start off with this, this claim, which

is, that, pretty much all music is actually network music.

and what I mean my that is, whenever,

musicians are playing together, they're creating a network.

Because, There's musician one here, and musician two, and musician three and

there's sound going that way and sound going that way and

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.

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.

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

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.

I just want to play a brief excerpt of the, of this broadcast

from 1977.

What it sounded like is all these people were calling in and whistling.

And they, we're getting mixed

through this automated equipment and

feedback delayed and it's shifted.

[SOUND]

So that gives you a sense of what it sounded like.

Another shared sonic environment I wanted to point out in particular because its

actually bundled with Reaper so you actually have it on your computer already.

is something called Ninjam, and this was originally developed as a standalone

product by Cockos, the, the company that makes Reaper in the mid 2000s.

and now it exists as a plugin in, inside of Reaper.

So, you can go a, a, and add this to the master

track or to an individual track in, in Reaper as you wish.

An interface

like this will pop up.

and, and it's particularly was designed to deal with the, the issues of latency.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Networked Music

Survey of Music Technology

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