A lecture by Georg Hajdu

This presentation will lay out some new ideas about the role of a conductor in network music performance. Typically, contemporary live electronic music is encountered in form of laptop performances. Here, much the same as in other interactive performance, the man-machine interaction consists of directly manipulating hardware and software. Mixed media performance under the control of a live conductor represents a different, albeit traditional, paradigm, while systems which are manipulated by a conductor via an electronic baton still belong to the former category of live interactive performance. Adding a conductor using software to interact with performers increases the complexity of the interaction by treating performers as intermediary agents between him/her and sound creation.In the networked multimedia performance environment Quintet.net, this is accomplished by on-the-fly generation of symbolic notation by the conductor which will be sight-read by the performers. Hence the metaphor of “playing the performers” (rather than an instrument). This concept is being demonstrated at the conference in my piece “Ivresse 1984,” for which a score by John Cage is being re-composed in real time via the interaction of the conductor with a multi-touch surface (with the generated parts being immediately sent to the performers). This strategy relies on novel software modules for Cycling ’74’s MaxMSP created by Nick Didkovsky and Ádám Siska on occasion of the Music in the Global Village conference.

Playing Performers. Some ideas about mediated network music performance. Paper by Georg Hajdu