Future Stages: “Bridging the Time-Space Divide” (2023)

In 2023, the Center for Innovation in the Arts put on a collaborative show with the Stauffer Academy in Cremona, Italy. The program featured student musicians from Juilliard performing in NYC as well as the musicians of the Quartetto Goldberg performing in Cremona, Italy. As part of this program, I put together a system using Sonobus that would allow us to pipe multi-channel audio from NYC to Italy and to receive multi-channel audio from Italy. Simply put, it’s a little bit like Zoom or Facetime, but with the capability of doing multi-channel sound, dynamic control over latency/delay times, and much higher quality audio codecs. We also broadcast video feeds back and forth, allowing projection designer Camilla Tassi to create a dynamic projection environment that showcased the musicians in Cremona as well as a wide range of designs. Getting this to be configured in a way that was stable, high quality, and most importantly, fit the parameters necessary for a smooth, evening length show with enormous projection screens, 8-channel speaker playback and a broad spectrum of music was a challenge, requiring the collaboration of a lot of different people.

The audio system that I built was prototyped for the department’s performance of Terry Riley’s In C just a short while earlier, but was here extended to allow for ambisonic playback and many, many different types of processing. For this program, the department commissioned a number of new student, alumni and faculty works that would take the “time-space divide” into account and thus take advantage of the latency inherent in performing networked music. These pieces were performed in the Willson Theater at Juilliard, using an eight-channel ambisonic speaker setup. The actual audio rig was created in Ableton Live, with ambisonic panning and some effects done using Envelop for Live as well as various custom devices that I put together. One of the main challenges of this program was to create a stable system that could not only send audio back and forth, but also do all manner of audio processing, panning and manipulation as required by the student pieces without needing to open and close files or patches mid-show. This is a challenge that I certainly made worse for myself, since it was often me that encouraged my students to go hog wild with the processing, multi-channel upmixing, etc. Striking the balance between performability and reliability is also challenging, but is doubly so when you live on the edge with experimental music. I get a lot of satisfaction in guiding students through the process of creating multimedia, technology-depend pieces like on this program, so it’s always a pleasure to work on something like this.

Below you can see a youtube video of Yuxuan Lin’s piece “the Monolith Odyssey” from the program.