Keynote 1

Chris Chafe: Probing Rhythmic Synchronization in our Mind’s Ear

Abstract
Web Audio enables crowd-sourced surveys involving sound synthesis and interaction. My music-making experiences with collaboration technologies like Jacktrip have led to studies of how we imagine flows of sound in time, particularly those which require tight synchronization. Web-based “active listening” techniques make it possible to gather self-reports from large numbers of individuals asking about how we hear, imagine and produce musical “objects” which unfold in time.

Bio
Chris Chafe is a composer, improvisor, and cellist, developing much of his music alongside computer-based research. He is Director of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). At IRCAM (Paris) and The Banff Centre (Alberta), he pursued methods for digital synthesis, music performance and real-time internet collaboration. CCRMA’s SoundWIRE project involves live concertizing with musicians the world over.

Online collaboration software including jacktrip and research into latency factors continue to evolve. An active performer either on the net or physically present, his music reaches audiences in dozens of countries and sometimes at novel venues. A simultaneous five-country concert was hosted at the United Nations in 2009. Chafe’s works are available from Centaur Records and various online media. Gallery and museum music installations are into their second decade with “musifications” resulting from collaborations with artists, scientists and MD’s. Recent work includes the Brain Stethoscope project, PolarTide for the 2013 Venice Biennale, Tomato Quintet for the transLife:media Festival at the National Art Museum of China and Sun Shot played by the horns of large ships in the port of St. Johns, Newfoundland.

Keynote 2

Franziska Schroeder: Distributed Listening – A Practitioner’s Perspective

Abstract
The sonorous network has changed how we make and listen to music in many exciting but also challenging ways. Whereas traditional performance spaces exude notions of unity, togetherness, coherence and situatedness, the network has challenged performers to listen closely to the superimposition of acoustics, while being confronted with the socially dynamic and the often musically unknown.
As performers we find ourselves in this almost schizophrenic state of being in a distant and sonically less identifiable space (something we grasp better with our ears), while also occupying a rather intimate and embodied listening space (something we grasp with our ears but also through touch).
As a performer I will draw on a few musical performance scenarios to explore this sonic flânerie, a musicking where our ear is urged to reach across nodes, and which ultimately positions listening as a corporeal and multi-dimensional experience that is continuously being re-shaped by technological, socio-political and cultural concerns.

Bio
Franziska is a saxophonist, improviser and theorist. She is a senior lecturer at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), Queen’s University Belfast, where she coaches students in improvisation, digital performance and critical theory.

A past AHRC funded Fellowship allowed her to immerse herself heavily into network performances, and in 2007 she based herself at SARC to work with composers and engineers, establishing a major hub for network performances in the UK. As part of this work she has collaborated on many occasions with Chris Chafe (the other Keynote speaker !) and his team in Stanford amongst many other musicians across the networked world.

Franziska ’s research is published in diverse international journals, including Leonardo, Organised Sound, Performance Research, Cambridge Publishing and Routledge. Franziska has published a book on performance and the threshold (VDM, 2009), an edited volume on user-generated content (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) as well as a volume on improvisation (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

She is currently interested in free improvisation practices in global contexts.