6th Post - Ideas for Controlling The Piece

I have also been thinking about how this will be performed and how much control I want to have over the performers/audience. At the moment there are 3 different versions that will need to be divided up fairly evenly between the audience. This could be done by assigning each person a number that would relate to the version they would need to download. Once everyone has there music downloaded to their device it would simply be a case of "1, 2, 3 Go!' and the the piece would play out on the phones.

This is how i plan to test my prototype as i want to keep it as simple as possible to start with. However, in later versions i would like to bring in sounds from other devices such as the computers in Scott 105 (our teaching room for music tech at Plym Uni). It would be interesting to have people starting the new audio at different points in the performance and this could be done via a colour coding system for the computers and a message projected onto the screen of the classroom. 

Another idea would be to make lots of different versions of differing lengths and let people re-trigger their audio as and when they want. This would make the piece a bit like Terry Riley's In C and would make the end result even more unpredictable. 

I think my ideas about control and organisation of the piece will develop naturally as the piece develops. For now the most important thing is testing it in a live situation with multiple devices.

5th Post - Further Developments

I decided to make a second version of my piece and to try experimenting with writing 3 different versions. This will mean that parts of the music can be spread out over different devices rather than all being played at the same time.  I found in the previous version that some of my rhythmic elements became too confused so i hope this will simplify that and add some interesting movement. I spread the percussion parts over 3 tracks and labelled them so that i could easily bounce the 3 different versions.

I did the same with the other elements in the track so that piano, strings and glockenspiel are all divided between the 3 different versions.

 I then bounced the 3 versions and uploaded them to SoundCloud so that they could be easily accessed by anyone participating in my trial version. 

I was hoping to be able to test the piece during a tutorial but it was not a suitable situation. Testing the pieces in a live situation is going to be one of the biggest challenges of this project. Getting a suitably large number of people together will take careful planning and organisation. However, one way of getting an idea of how it might sound is to create multiple instances of each version in a DAW and offset them slightly as well as panning them. 



This gives a rough idea of how the piece might sound but I will attempt to record a performance on multiple devices over Christmas.