Abstract
This paper discusses the development of artistic collaboration during the global lockdown, related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The art work under study involves the author’s practices of ecological sound art and intercultural collaboration in collaboration withCanadian composer and improviser John Oliver. A primary outcome of this work was the album Isolation Journal, released in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. One feature of Isolation Journal was how it revisited site-specific recordings made in Vietnam, on the countryside north of Hanoi, for an installation made by Östersjö in collaboration with Nguyễn Thanh Thủy and Matthew Sansom (Östersjö and Nguyễn 2016). Through remote interactions, and by building a complex sampler instrument using Östersjö’s recordings of Aeolian đàn đáy, a traditional Vietnamese lute, as well as field recordings from the site, Oliver and Östersjö created the album Isolation Journal through remote interaction. This in turn became a fundamental building block when the author’s Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones took the initiative to develop a scene for telematic performance at Manzi Art Space in Hanoi. This series started out with a concert with John Oliver, The Six Tones and guest performers from Hanoi in July 2020. Building on audio and video documentation, as well as on qualitative interviews with the participating co-performers, an analysis of the emergence of discursive voice (Gorton and Östersjö 2019) is drawn from these two internally linked artistic projects. The paper develops the analytical framework of tele-copresence, a synthesis of the contrasting concepts of telepresence and copresence, as a means for analysing the virtual presence which emerges through such remote musical interaction.
Abstract
This paper discusses the development of artistic collaboration during the global lockdown, related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The art work under study involves the author’s practices of ecological sound art and intercultural collaboration in collaboration withCanadian composer and improviser John Oliver. A primary outcome of this work was the album Isolation Journal, released in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. One feature of Isolation Journal was how it revisited site-specific recordings made in Vietnam, on the countryside north of Hanoi, for an installation made by Östersjö in collaboration with Nguyễn Thanh Thủy and Matthew Sansom (Östersjö and Nguyễn 2016). Through remote interactions, and by building a complex sampler instrument using Östersjö’s recordings of Aeolian đàn đáy, a traditional Vietnamese lute, as well as field recordings from the site, Oliver and Östersjö created the album Isolation Journal through remote interaction. This in turn became a fundamental building block when the author’s Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones took the initiative to develop a scene for telematic performance at Manzi Art Space in Hanoi. This series started out with a concert with John Oliver, The Six Tones and guest performers from Hanoi in July 2020. Building on audio and video documentation, as well as on qualitative interviews with the participating co-performers, an analysis of the emergence of discursive voice (Gorton and Östersjö 2019) is drawn from these two internally linked artistic projects. The paper develops the analytical framework of tele-copresence, a synthesis of the contrasting concepts of telepresence and copresence, as a means for analysing the virtual presence which emerges through such remote musical interaction.
Video Example 1: A spectrogram video of an excerpt from 'Mountain Spirits', which displays the increased spectral content in the processed lute, compared to the first part, which is entirely acoustic.
The video illustrates a central aspect of the interaction between Östersjö and Oliver taking the track ‘Mountain Spirits’ as an example. In the first half of the piece we hear the original lute improvisation, wherein Östersjö also plays the extended strings using a metal slide, both to modulate pitch and to sometimes strike the open strings: we hear the click of the slide, as well as the resonance of the strings. in the second half, Oliver enhances ‘the detail of those đàn đáy sounds and increases their spectral energy’, as expressed in an interview on the 15th of February 2022
Video Example 3: An excerpt from the performance at Manzi, drawn from the last minutes of the concert. This video combines a recording of the Soundjack feed with a local recording of the two acoustic instruments in Stockholm. Unfortunately, the video and audio recordings at Manzi failed, and therefore, the only reference to the sounding outcome is drawn from these files, which also include local video recordings from each of the remote sites.
Video Example 2: A spectrogram video of an excerpt from Mountain Spirits, which displays the increased spectral content in the processed lute, compared to the first part, which is entirely acoustic.
The video illustrates a central aspect of the interaction between Östersjö and Oliver taking the track ‘Mountain Spirits’ as an example. In the first half of the piece we hear the original lute improvisation, wherein Östersjö also plays the extended strings using a metal slide, both to modulate pitch and to sometimes strike the open strings: we hear the click of the slide, as well as the resonance of the strings. in the second half, Oliver enhances ‘the detail of those đàn đáy sounds and increases their spectral energy’, as expressed in an interview on the 15th of February 2022
Isolation Journal:
remote interactions in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic
Stefan Östersjö (2024)
paper published in Contemporary Music Review.
