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Music of the Indeterminate Place

Music of the Indeterminate Place: telematic performance and composition intersecting physical and networked spaces.

This three-year research project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, is carried out by members of the research cluster GEMM, at the Piteå School of Music, Luleå University of Technology. The project explores how network technologies create and enable new relationships between musicians, instruments and virtual and physical spaces. With various digital instruments and tools, the TCP/IP Quartet and the choreographer Åsa Unander-Scharin at Luleå University of Technology play digitally controllable organs. Each space where these instruments are located has specific acoustic qualities. When these space are connected through network technologies, a fusion of acoustic properties and the timbres of the instruments occurs. Hereby, the project can seek to understand the phenomenon that already the telephone creates, the experience of being present in more than one place at the same time. The project studies compositional and performative techniques to create music for places that arise from the combination of physical spaces in a third indeterminate place. Each part of the project is designed as an elongated examination in a research laboratory. Here, phenomenological variation is a method for specifically exploring the human experience of the technologies and their inherent possibilities.

Through performance with telematically connected pipe organs, the project aims to gain knowledge of how sound can be processed to create meaningful interactions with remote musical instruments and acoustic spaces. Further, it aims to explore how a performer can engage in embodied interactions with remote musical instruments and how reconfiguring network relationships may affect such interactions. The project is structured as an artistic research laboratory in four distinct Scenarios, within which the method is to create phenomenological variations on artistic materials generated by reconfiguring the design of the networked interactions. Beyond its impact on network performance research, the project contributes to the development of artistic research methods through laboratory practices.