Bridging Imaginary Boundaries

Broadcast Station

Back in March, Synthia Payne and John Gunther organized a telematic music event "Memory and the Internet".  This was a collaboration between CU, NYU, and KAIST in Korea over Internet2.  Gunther and Payne returned this Fall for another installation of the event, "Bridging Imaginary Boundaries".  I feel these remote performances are truly on the cutting edge of music technology, so I was very excited to have another such collaboration.  For this version, we changed a few things, and collaborated with IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue at University of Indiana) as opposed to KAIST.



BlOrk was present, as were members of the CU Jazz Studies department.  And of course, we brought back our good friend Janet Feder to play her prepared guitar.  Additionally, we invited a number of dancers to collaborate with our musicians, including Sabrina Cavins and Skye Hughes.  This added another very interesting element into our performance, as we had true physical interaction with the technology.  They were given a computer with an interactive Jitter patch to play with in addition to interacting with dancers at the other universities.  We also set up 5 cameras through a video mixer for our broadcast, providing a number of viewpoints for us to broadcast. 

Dancers interacting with Jitter

For this iteration, we continued to use JackTrip for our audio broadcast.  This technology has been established and we feel confident in it's stability.  Unlike the previous attempt, we had enough experience this time to receive separate feeds from each university.  This made mixing the show much easier, as each studio sent a different level of signal.  However, we experimented with a new video broadcast tool UltraVideo, which, despite hours of tweaking, we were unable to get working.  Our backup was a simple iChat video conference, and this worked fine, despite the latency between audio and visual signals.

Performance

It was such a pleasure to work with Synthia again, and incorporating new musicians and dancers into our side of the performance made the experience so much better than expected.  While configuring and testing these signals is a difficult and time consuming process, it is something we are figuring out. For future iterations (that I hopefully will be involved in) we should be able to work this into a more precise science.  I look forward to seeing more and more musicians working together over the internet and experiencing how the technology develops and changes each performance.

Congratulations to CU, NYU, and IUPUI