multi.operator

Interactive music performance, improvisation using WIFI and mobiles, 2016-present

Rationale

The audience as important as performer or author, and Internet blurred the boundaries between sides. The musical piece is living and existing only when the listeners give an emotion, judge or reacting otherways. This cross-dependence is good to explain the phenomena of mass raves, blues jams, popularity of dadaism practice with ready-made concept (the audience became an author by announcing some non-art object as aesthetically valuable) and other collaborative practices. In the multi.operator project I'm addressing directly to this point of view on listener's role. At the same time, by using net technologies I'm making a straight accent on networking foundation of society and its collaborative practices, the music improvisation in this case.

Description

The audience is invited to take a part of live sample recording and playing, by using their mobile devices and WiFi connection to the musician's laptop. Saxophonist is playing jazz tunes, simple melodies, abstracts sounds and noises, and listeners with their phones are choosing what and when to repeat, to compose together a canvas of unpredictable but fascinating glitch jazz. Fixed tonality converges this chaos to tonal base and makes it sound just like a massive free jazz improvisation, introducing this culture to unprepared one just by give them the opportunity to play it by themselves.

Release

Technical information

I'm using a WiFi router to make a hotspot for the audience. After established WiFi connection, they just open the URL in browsers, no applications or installations needed!

All communications happens in WebSocket way to reduce the latency as possible, and the results comparable with latency caused by speed of sound in the air.

WiFi router is chosen by required capacity for good performance, and tested well with more than 50 participators.

Used technologies: Python, WiFi, HTML, Javascript, WebSocket, MIDI, Ableton.

Showcase

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