After several years working as a sound engineer, composer and music industry consultant, Alain Renaud embarked on a PhD. in network music performance at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), Queen’s University Belfast in 2005, completed in 2009. Alain was appointed as a lecturer at Bournemouth University in the southwest of England in November 2008.
His research focuses on the development of networked music performance systems with an emphasis on the creation of strategies to interact over a network musically and the notion of shared networked acoustic spaces. He performs regularly over the network with the NetVs.Net collective (www.netvsnet.com) and has performed and presented his research in various places, such as the Banff Centre for the Art, The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, where he was a visiting scholar in 2007 and various conferences, including New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) and the Audio Engineering Society (AES). He is also involved as an advisor in the EU network performance project, CoMeDia (www.comedia.eu.org).
He is to co-direct the Sounding Out International conference at Bournemouth University in 2010. In his spare time, he has been producing music for the Montreux Jazz Festival (www.montreuxjazz.com) since 1997.
CONFERENCE – BREIF ABSTRACT:
The new generation of research high-speed networks is bringing the potential for developing an environment of communicating objects. This environment doesn’t use the network in a traditional fashion by interacting with it through a keyboard or a mouse but in a bi-directional way through seamless, transparent interfaces such as distributed musical instruments. The field of network music performance (NMP) in particular is at the forefront of this innovation as it allows performers and audiences to communicate, eavesdrop and travel across a combination of virtual spaces and physical remote environments. The presentation examines recent developments in NMP and associated initiatives, which potentially signal one of the first indications that the next web generation, Web 3.0, might consist of a set of interconnected modules allowing people to interact meaningfully and create content that is web-centric and couldn’t exist outside of a networked situation.