This exposition documents my ongoing research on extending my solitary live-coding practice into a collaborative environment. In place of a more traditional parallel improvisation where each participants generates there own music/sound, the improvisors share abstract musical data over a simple MIDI-network and arrange and transform this data on the fly. The transformation of data by each performer is key, it means that neither of us requires total control, however both contribute to the final musical result.

Other examples of network music:

The experiments with Olaf came about in a very spontaneous way. For the purposes of this research I would like to now explore related work by others to see how they dealt with the oppertunities and challanges that we encountered, hopefully finding a way to move forward.

The Hub

The Hub was an ensemble formed by Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Tim Perkins, Chris Brown, Mark Trayle and John Bischoff based in San Fransisco. They formed in 1986, so right at the advent of the arrival of MIDI1. Their musical reference points were formed by John Cage, David Tudor (in particular his piece Rainforest), Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros.

Their early performances used a "blackboard system", this means that instead of sending each other messages, there is a shared data-structure that all composer/performers can read and write to (p41). They refered to this as "the blob".

"Each of the six players runs a program of his own design which constitutes a self sustaining musical process. Each program is configured so that it can send three changing variables impotant to its operation out to the Hub and also to receive three variables from other players. Each player reads the variables put out by three different performers, and sends out for use by three different performers as wel. This relationship of mutual influence results in a network structure that often yields a special kind of musical coherence"

Eventually around 1990, Scot Graham Lancaster programmed a midi interface to create a MIDI based Hub 2. It allowed each player to address each other player individually, and also to receive inputs of the others as separate channels in real time.

In the words of Scot: "This new arrangement allowed each participant in the group a direct and private MIDI message path to each of the other participants, making it unnecessary to access and interpret a shared memory space. This new context created new ways of thinking about the concept of a network for making music."

A graphic depiction of the data flow and MIDI channel assignments of the MIDI- based Hub 2. (Photo: Scot Gresham-Lancaster)

What I find particularly interesting about that setup, is that it much more directly allows for the sharing a shared time structure, as in the midi streams are not just static data, but extist as timed events in a serial stream of data. By routing information through (basing your output on the input of others), it also allowed to create series of transformations, where material is circulated and transformed through the network. This approach seems to be the basis of one of their pieces:

"Waxlips (Tim Perkis, 1991) was an attempt to find the simplest Hub piece possible, to minimize the amount of musical structure planned in advance, in order to allow any emergent struc- ture arising out of the group interaction to be revealed clearly. The rule is simple: each player sends and receives requests to play one note. Upon receiving the request, each should play the note requested, and then transform the note message in some fixed way to a different message, and send it out to someone else. The transformation can follow any rule the player wants, with the one limitation that within any one section of the piece, the same rule must be followed (so that any particular message in will always cause the same new message out). One lead player sends signals indicating new sections in the piece (where players change their transformation rules) and jump-starts the process by spraying the network with a burst of requests. The network action had an unexpected living and liquid behavior: the number of possible interactions is astronomical in scale, and the evolution of the network is always different, sometimes terminating in complex (chaotic) states including near repetitions, sometimes ending in simple loops, repeated notes, or just dying out altogether. In initially trying to get the piece going, the main problem was one of plugging leaks: if one player missed some note requests and didn't send anything when he should, the notes would all trickle out. Different rule sets seem to have different degrees of "leakiness", due to imperfect behavior of the network, and as lead player I would occasionally double up, sending out two requests for every one received, to revitalize a tired net [17]."

Waxlips excerpt (The Hub, Tim Perkis)

"Today, it makes more sense to think of the computer network as an extension of society. These networks have a degree of complexity which prevents us from 'controlling' them any longer: we have to participate in a conversation with them. In a conversation, one says things, not knowing what the next person will say, and therefore, not knowing what oneself will say next either." (Perkins 1996)

Commuta (ICLC, 2023)

Francesco Corvi, Riccardo Ancona, Giulia Francavilla (Giulia Rae)

Commuta is a trio algorithmic performance dealing with the notion of cross-adaptive sonic relationships. Three performers are entangled in a network of influences obtained by dynamically relating the expressive features of each sound stream with the others. In this system, live coding acts as a form of interaction capable of producing perturbations and changing on-the-fly the overall structure of the network. The joint result seeks for an emergent complexity lying at the intersection of the the three performer’s individual practices: the development of adaptive sonic processes in live coding by Francesco Corvi (nesso.xyz), Giulia Rae’s exploration of machine listening techniques for environmental synthetic soundscapes, and Riccardo Ancona’s study on material identities in corpus manipulations.

What may have happened (Johan van Kreij)

Also uses an abstract form of centrallized data, and explores the idea of using the unique characteristics of online collaborative music making, embracing the particularities of latency, connect/disconnect not as a technological challenge but as a unqiue environment.

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/995063/1127855

Slork: Stanford Laptop Orchestra

https://slork.stanford.edu/

Recent concert...

https://vimeo.com/835112637#t=7m51s

Flux (Dick Raaijmakers, 1967)

[ Complex patch of analog studio devices. Has a very "network" like mindset and was composed 1 year before "Rain Forest" by David Tutor. David Tudor was however already making these device networks for some time. Reference for David Tudor: reminded by the instruments ]

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