USP musicians hold concerts with overseas musicians in real time via internet

An experiment is part of a research project on networked music enabling musicians and players from across the world to interact.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – A group of musicians from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) are composing and playing with musicians overseas without the need for them to leave Brazil or for the foreign participants to come here.

Through high-speed internet connections, these musicians are organizing concerts with musicians from countries as far away as Northern Ireland, with whom they produced the second Net Concert at the end of March. The concert was held via the internet in real time in Belfast, Ireland and in São Paulo.

The experiment is part of a project conducted by researchers from the USP School of Communications and Arts together with the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IME), with funding from FAPESP. The project aims to use and develop interactive processes in the area of technologically mediated musical production.

One of the project’s topics is networked music, a new category of music that has appeared since the advent of the internet. Real-time communication offers new possibilities for thinking about and creating music with musicians in different locations around the globe.

Through an agreement with Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), the university that has led research in this field in Europe, Brazilian researchers began to cultivate this field of study in Latin America in recent years.

“Networked music has been studied for over 20 years in Europe and the United States, where most of the research tools used in the area today are developed. We are trying to create a research nucleus for networked music in São Paulo,” Julián Jaramillo Arango, one of the researchers involved in the study, told Agência FAPESP.

According to Arango, who is completing his doctorate as a FAPESP fellow, composers have studied and developed musical creations on the creative platform of digital networks since 1990.

One of the main challenges these researchers have encountered in working with music on digital networks is synchronizing the events so that groups of musicians and performers in different global locations have a common shared unit of time, which is fundamental in music.

“The internet has limitations, such as a delay in sending and receiving signals from one place to the next. We try to incorporate these discontinuities in the works,” explained Arango.

One strategy used by the researchers to manage these time displacements on digital networks is to use two screens projecting images of the two locations where the musicians and performers participating in the virtual concerts are playing, as in the Net Concert.

On the first screen, for example, the musicians and performers in São Paulo can see their colleagues in Belfast, and vice versa. The second screen has a written score of the compositions in real time, called the online score, with musical notation and images that the musicians and performers see at the exact moment that the piece is played through commands sent simultaneously by the conductor to the two locations.

“This is a way to conduct the groups of musicians and performers in each location so that they can synchronize themselves. We had to prepare special software to work online to do this,” said Arango.

Fertile ground for improvisation

According to the researcher, producing an online concert is a long and involved process requiring, among other factors, familiarity with the cultural differences between the musicians and performers from different countries who attempt to create something together.

To produce the Net Concert, for example, the Brazilian researchers began to gather the musicians and performers, select compositions, hold rehearsals and perform audio/video connection tests in January.

In addition to preparing the infrastructure, the Brazilian researchers also helped to compose one of the five pieces performed in the concert, for which they interacted with musicians in Belfast via the internet in real time. Arango is one of the composers of the vocal composition “Ser Voz” by Michelle Agnes, which opened the concert.

This composition is for four voices, two male vocalists in Brazil and two female vocalists in Belfast. During the musical and theatrical performance, close-up images of the lips of each performer are projected side by side on a large screen.

In another composition titled “Cipher Series” by Pedro Rebelo, an upright bass player in São Paulo “dueled” with a pianist in Belfast, inspired by graphic scores in a performance similar to a jam session or jazz improvisation.

“Networked music allows musicians from different parts of the world to develop their musical knowledge during the performance and ends up emphasizing improvisation,” said Arango.

“Social interaction is an important part of musical interpretation. The network accentuates remote presence, and this creates a good environment for improvisation. The musicians make decisions about what they will play based on what the other is playing, through imitation or variation, depending on their musical education or imagination,” he explained.
 
According to Arango, networked music is not only for contemporary music, such as electronic music. In spite of the fact that networked music is mostly used by composers focused on contemporary musical language and chamber music groups—groups with conventional instruments, such as piano, bass, flute, saxophone and percussion in addition to electronic instruments, synthesizers and computers—the new category of music is open to all styles and types of musical instruments.

“The network isn’t something that will result in an original style of musical content. It’s yet another platform upon which any type of music, from the most classical to the most popular, can be contemplated and progress,” Arango affirmed.

The Brazilian researchers intend to create a collection of compositions for networked music with the group from Queen’s University Belfast. They also plan to hold another online concert involving musicians from a third city in addition to São Paulo and Belfast. “We may work on this in 2012,” said Arango.