Vienna Launch for Being Dufay

Being Dufay launched in central Europe last month at the Vienna Konzerthuas to an enthusiastic crowd. Here are some pics from the rehearsal.

Why not take a visit to BeingDufay.com which includes example audio and background information on the project.

ECM to release Being Dufay

John Potter, tenor voice
Ambrose Field, composer and live electronics

Ambrose Field created Being Dufay in 2007, using extracts from Guillaume Dufay’s songs and motets sung by John Potter. From the outset, it was conceived both as a studio album and an hour-long concert event. In this live realisation of a studio sound world, Dufay’s music is presented intact, not something weird and alien, but rather an ‘investigation’ into the potential already in the original material. John sings the Dufay lines, while Ambrose digitally modifies newly composed material. The result is a rich, contemporary sound world which retains the essence of 15th-century Franco-Flemish polyphony.

ECM are releasing the CD of Being Dufay early in 2009, and the first launch event takes place in the Resonanzen Festival at the Vienna Konzerthaus on January 21st.

Being Dufay in rehearsal

Lightpaths and remote musical collaboration

Work has started today on the Janet Lightpath linkup between York and Edinburgh. In an event for the JISC funded e-science conference (Edinburgh) this segment of ultra-fast, low latency international fibre-based network will be first used for making a high resolution, uncompressed (in data terms) surround recording at a 300 mile distance. This is rather like what we’ve needed from the internet for the last ten years, but it hasn’t previously delivered (instead still serving up low res, streaming data compressed audio). This is particularly the case still in the UK, although the USA has enjoyed similiar systems for a while now. I’ll simply be working with the musical material captured and hope to be able to send it back to the performers for review and collaborative editing later (at full resolution) later in the day. I’m particularly interested to see if this model of ‘remote production, or collaborative recording’ can actually work for me, as this system finally permits the traditional audio compromises involved with long distance, network audio to be largely dissolved. I’ve been waiting for this time for a while.

Worldscape Laptop Orchesta: upcoming paper at ICMC

Our research paper describing the music and technology behind the Worldscape Laptop Orchestra has had the good fortune of being selected for the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) in Belfast this August.

photo: (c)Phil McPhee

In creating the Worldscape Laptop Orchestra I wanted to push the available technology as far as possible in enabling group musical expression on a mass scale. Seeing no point in duplicating the work of other well known laptop orchestras (such as Princeton’s notable ‘Plork’), we instead chose to focus our work on concerns specifically relating to musical and technological scalability. New music was written for the ensemble by composers Alex Harker, Jethro Bagust, Angie Atmadjaja and myself, examining the aesthetic dynamic which results from having 50 digital performers in the same room at the same time.

The Worldscape Laptop Orchestra does not constrain people aesthetically, and the works created represent a whole spectrum of digital music from chip-tune to Jazz inspired sonic exploration. We’ll get some video up shortly. The relationship between participants, their music and the technology changes with each piece we perform.

photo: (c) Phil McPhee

The ensemble has little in common with traditional ‘orchestras’: we are not attempting to emulate the sounds or performance practice of the nineteenth century. Instead, we hope to contribute in a small way to the massive expansion in digital arts exploration being conducted today, searching for new aesthetics and technologies which rely on the intersection of art and science. We developed our own in-house software in C, pure data, and max/msp for machine and performer communication, specifically using new wi-fi ‘N’ technology standards to cope with the high data rates. All performances were entirely wire free!

The Worldscape Laptop Orchestra was supported by Apple Computer Inc, and was part of a three hour immersive media production ‘Worldscape’ presented at the University of York, UK. in Sept 2007. I’d like to thank everyone who took part in this remarkable event for making it possible.