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October 06, 2004

Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music and Technology

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Networked Music

Interconnection has always been a fundamental principle of music, prompting experimental artists to explore the implications of linking their computers together long before the Internet reached the public consciousness. As the Internet achieved critical mass over the past decade, networking technology took centre stage as the key to a vast new territory of possibility, facilitating remote participation, distributed processing, and redefinition of musical space and time. The Web emerged as a virtual venue for countless musical purposes, and as analog acoustics transformed to digital representations, packets of data carried by IP from one address to another became a modern metaphor for air molecules transmitting the tone of vibrating body to eardrum.

As with any new technology, applications of networking to music have evolved from naïve proofs-of-concept to more sophisticated projects, and we stand now at a point when 'internetworking' is taken for granted, novelty is expiring and artistic goals more often transcend technical considerations. From this vantage, the essential question is not how networking and music are combined, but why. What is the unique experience that can be created? Whose role can be empowered or transformed: composer, performer, audience? Where can sound come alive that it couldn't otherwise? Networked music can reinterpret traditional perspectives on stagecraft, ensemble, improvisation, instrumentation, and collaboration, or enable otherwise impractical relationships between controllers, sensors, processors, inputs, and outputs. The network can be an interface, a medium, an amplifier, a microphone, a mirror, a conduit, a cloud, or a heartbeat.

The network is all of us. Music is the sound we make. Listen...

Call for Articles and Works

Volume 10, Number 3
Issue thematic title: Networked Music
Date of Publication: December 2005
Publishers: Cambridge University Press

We invite submissions from composers, performers, artists and researchers working in the realm of digital media and sound. Submissions related to the theme are encouraged; however, those that fall outside the scope of this theme are always welcome.

Issue Co-ordinators: Margaret Schedel [gem at schedel.net] and John P. Young [sound at netmuse.org]. This issue is being prepared in collaboration with the International Computer Music Association (ICMA).

The theme represents many avenues for discussion including, but not limited to:

Networked control interfaces (hardware/software)
Sensor arrays/interaction
Distributed/remote participation (composition, performance, reception)
Broadcasting/multicasting/streaming media
Virtual musical environments/venues
Aesthetics/philosophy of musical interconnection
Web-based music projects
OpenSoundControl
Distance learning/education
Online collaboration
Networked data sonification
Real-time remote sensing
Distributed processing
Networking for fault tolerance
Musical avatars/agents/bots
Emergent network phenomena/effects/behavior
Neural networks
Internet2
Alternative musical networks (RF, MIDI, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.)
Strategies for mitigating network limitations (bandwidth, latency, etc.)

This issue continues the annual partnership between Organised Sound and the International Computer Music Association, with previous themes including "Performing with Technology" and "Collaboration and Intermedia." In exploring these prior areas, networking has emerged as a common element underlying a wide variety of innovative projects, prompting a more focused look at the mutual influence between networks and music. This should be no surprise in the electroacoustic field, where our machines are partners as much as tools, and working with other artists or often even solo requires connection between multiple machines. In the pre-network era, technical obstacles frequently dictated that much computer music occurred in relative isolation, with musicians expending precious attention acting as interpreters between hardware and other humans. So in one sense, networked music can be simply a recapitulation of acoustic music principles, of listening and sensitivity to other performers and audience, by enabling computers to participate equally in the musical conversation. Networking can also radically alter these traditional principles, most obviously by decoupling the spatial framework, enabling some or all of the participants to act and perceive without being physically present. Thus networked music is fertile territory for the composers, performers, and researchers that comprise the ICMA as both a potential means of overcoming challenging limitations of technology, as well as presenting new possibilities we have yet to imagine.

Submissions may consist of papers, with optional supporting short compositions or excerpts, audio-visual documentation of performances and/or other aspects related to your submission. Supporting audio and audio-visual material will be presented as art of the journal's annual DVD-ROM which will appear with issue 10/3. Related discussion will be located on the ICMA Array website, and additional multimedia at Organised Sound's Cambridge University Press website.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 1 March 2005

SUBMISSION FORMAT

Notes for Contributors and further details can be obtained from the inside back cover of published issues of Organised Sound or from:

http://uk.cambridge.org/journals/oso/

Email submissions should be sent to (please see SUBMISSION FORMAT above): os at dmu.ac.uk

Hard copy of articles (only when requested) and other material (e.g., images, sound and audio-visual files, etc.) should be submitted to:

Prof. Leigh Landy
Organised Sound
Clephan Building
De Montfort University
Leicester LE1 9BH, UK.

Editor: Leigh Landy
Associate Editors: Ross Kirk and Richard Orton
Regional Editors: Joel Chadabe, Kenneth Fields, Eduardo Miranda, Jøran
Rudi, Barry Truax, Ian Whalley, David Worrall
ICMA Representative: Mary Simoni
International Editorial Board: Marc Battier, Laurant Bayle, Hannah Bosma, Allesandro Cipriani, Simon Emmerson, Rajmil Fischman, David Howard, Rosemary Mountain, Tony Myatt, Jean-Claude Risset, Francis Rumsey

Posted by jo at October 6, 2004 09:27 AM

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